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COLLEGE SONS 
AND COLLEGE FATHERS 











COLLEGE 
SONS and 
COLLEGE 
FATHERS 






Henry Seidel Canby 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OP ENGLISH 
TALE UNIVERSITY 






HARPER & BROTHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 














College Sons and College Fathers 



Copyright, IQIS. by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published September, 1915 



0^^ 



SEP 25 1915 



CUJliVOl 



TO 
M. G. C 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface vii 

The Undergraduate 1 

The Undergraduate Background 26 

The Professor 48 

The Luxury of being Educated 71 

College Life and College Education 97 

Culture and Prejudice 118 

The Colleges and Mediocrity 138 

Current Literature and the Colleges 159 

Writing English 184 

Teaching English 210 



PREFACE 

For this book I have chosen the essay rather 
than the chapter as a unit of division, so that I 
might be able to discuss each of my topics as a 
subject important in itself. The ten essays here 
included proceed, I am emboldened to think, 
according to a development of experience and 
of thought that is coherent even if not severely 
logical. The first five treat of profit and loss 
in college life and college teaching; the last 
five of the broader problems that the American 
college must meet. But I have had no desire 
to mark out my field into sections, and cover 
them all. It is too extensive, too full of life 
and perplexity and happiness, to dogmatize 
and classify and divide and define within it. 
If I had been possessed of an elaborate ped- 
agogical doctrine, I should have spent more 
time upon mapping the corners, and less upon 
trying to say truly what I have seen and what 
I think. Indeed, I am more interested in 



PREFACE 



college life, college students, and conditions 
as they are to-day in our colleges, than in any 
program or theory whatsoever. 

As it happened, it was not the rage of the 
propagandist, but rather the creative working 
of happy memory, and sobering experience 
reacting upon thought, that led to the writing 
of this book. Hence he who so desires may 
read these essays as a literary, and I trust not 
unpleasant, transcript of experience, selecting 
his topic as he chooses his cigar, for the promise 
of its label. Or if his interest is more profes- 
sional, he will find the principles that I have 
endeavored to draw from observation applied 
and reapplied to the problems of the American 
college. 

I have written for undergraduates, present, 
past, and prospective, and for the parents of 
undergraduates. It is true that I have ad- 
dressed these essays to college sons and college 
fathers. But they may be applied, I believe, 
doubtless with important modifications of de- 
tail, to college daughters and the mothers of 
college daughters as well. It is a sufl5ciently 
difficult task to describe even the sex one knows 
best, when it is involved in the obscure proc- 



PREFACE 



esses of getting educated. And so I have ven- 
tured to write for, but not of, the woman in 
our colleges. 

I wish to acknowledge the courtesy of 
Harper^s Magazine and The Yale Review in 
permitting the reprint in revised form of these 
essays; and to thank a hundred unnamed un- 
dergraduates for a personal relationship with- 
out which I would not have had the courage to 
pretend to whatever insight they may possess. 
Henry Seidel Canby. 

New Haven, Connecticut, 
June 17, 1915. 



COLLEGE SONS 
AND COLLEGE FATHERS 



COLLEGE SONS 
AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

THE UNDERGRADUATE 

IT was a somnolent afternoon in May. There 
was a grass-cutter on the college lawn out- 
side, and a persistent oriole in the elms. We 
were on Browning; "Childe Roland to the 
Dark Tower Came" was the lesson. As the 
application to life and idealism became clear, 
the mystery of the poem began to stir the men 
before me. In spite of the drowsy noises and 
the warm sleepiness of the air, I could see 
interest awaken in their faces, and feel their 
minds stretch to take in the thought of the 
poet. When I reached "Dauntless the slug- 
horn to my lips I set, and blew. Childe Roland 
to the Dark Tower came," I could pause in a 

tense silence, and say, "That's all for to-day," 

1 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

with quite a pleasant glow of successful achieve- 
ment. 

They picked up their hats and most of them 
scurried for the ball-game. But a row gathered 
in front of my desk. "What is my mark, 
please?" one asked, and jarred unpleasantly on 
my optimistic mood. "Am I going to be 
warned this month.^'* said another. "Are we 
going to have this in the examination .f^" a third 
pleaded. Then up stood, then out stepped, 
then in struck, amid all these, a fourth with a 
cold, hard-souled look to him. "What is there 
practical in all this literature, Professor.'^" he 
queried, obstinately; and might have added, 
" Your answer won't interest me." 

I went into my office, and sat down to think it 
out. I remembered a phrase of my old teacher: 
"The astonishing power of the undergraduate 
mind to resist the intrusion of knowledge." I 
remembered the multitudinous articles, essays, 
letters, reports I had been reading on the failure 
of the colleges; the hail which (from papers 
they never read, and speeches they never hear) 
had been pouring on these boys; and, thinking 
not so much of the disappointment of this last 
attempt of mine as of other more serious dis- 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



comfitures, I wondered if it were not all true. 
Then I began to take stock. And as I thought 
over my years in college and my years of teach- 
ing, and the misunderstandings and the blind- 
nesses of them, and the charming boys I had 
known, and the wasted energies, and all the 
mistakes to be made in dealing with plastic but 
incalculable life, I found myself coming out at 
a door quite different from the one by which I 
had entered. I felt as great an impatience 
with the howl and outcry against the colleges 
and the undergraduate as with the story- 
tellers who have been romanticizing college 
life until they have distorted it. The saying 
of gentle Traherne came into my mind, "Prize 
what you have," and I began to wonder if 
before we accept the growing condemnation 
of college life, and the failure of the college to 
educate, it would not be well to understand 
and to appreciate the undergraduate. 

It is not an easy thing to do. On the one 
hand, there is sentimental fiction, which has 
cast a delusive glamour upon him. On the 
other, there is the business man who says he 
is untrained, the literary man who calls him 

illiterate, and the educator who asserts that he 

3 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

is unwilling. There is his own personality, 
which is in a transition stage, and so doubly 
hard to comprehend. And there are his poses, 
many and various, which must be discounted 
before we can begin. Nevertheless, it is a dull 
observer who cannot be certain that three 
estimable virtues — courtesy, energy, and loyalty 
— ^flourish in the colleges. 

The word "undergraduate" — in certain peri- 
odicals — ^has always an adjective linked to it, 
such as "uncouth," "boisterous," "noisy," 
"ill-mannered." We who live with him won- 
der why. Noisy and boisterous he is, but 
usually on highly proper occasions. He cheers 
at the theater instead of clapping; personally 
I like it; and the actors seem to like it, too. 
He improvises scratch quartets between lec- 
tures, and chants in the corridors. Why not! 
Uncouth he may be occasionally when, in the 
presence of his elders, especially the women, he 
remembers that, after all, he is little more than 
a boy, and stumbles over a chair or pronounces 
with difficulty. Ill-mannered he certainly is 
not. The old days, when tutors were stoned 
in their rooms and bulldogs set on the lecturers, 
have gone, at least in the colleges with which 

4 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



I am familiar. Courtesy is as much a part of 
college custom as cleanliness; the politeness of 
one's class is a wall through which it is difficult 
to break. An insulting answer in a recitation- 
room is nearly as rare as a burst of tears. If 
a piece of chalk should hit me when my back 
was turned — and in the old days they did not 
stop with chalk — I should believe that it was 
an accident, and probably be right. It is true 
that courtesy is only a by-product of educa- 
tion, to use President Wilson's happy phrase. 
But there is more of it in the colleges than in 
the world outside. 

Again, it is an old reproach against the 
college student that he is idle and lazy. Our 
present race of undergraduates are energetic 
beyond belief. Besides study — and, in spite 
of the current opinion, all of them do study— 
they are busy in a hundred directions. It was 
only recently that the faculty extorted an un- 
willing promise from the workers of the Yale 
News not to carry on their competition after 
midnight! Football, baseball, the crew, mean 
hours every day of hard labor (not fun, mind 
you) for half the year at least. Fraternity cam- 
paigning leaves the men exhausted in mind and 

5 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

body at the end of the "rushing season." The 
Y.M.C. A., business managerships for the many 
organizations, to say nothing of the hundred 
activities by means of which the needy support 
themselves, make college life a whirl of action, 
in which only the negligible and the despised 
hang back. You must make an appointment, 
as with a corporation president, if you wish 
to see a college leader out of recitation hours! 
That these efforts are well directed, that this 
is the ideal of academic leisure, I do not con- 
tend. But energy is certainly not a vice. 
No one — except the fat monks of the English 
monasteries — criticized the Northmen for their 
energy. And there is even more energy in our 
colleges than in American life. 

But the great and shining virtue of the under- 
graduate is loyalty. At least one eminent 
philosopher thinks that in this word the greater 
virtues are summed. However that may be, 
wherever college life is sounded, in athletics, 
in friendship, in devotion to the college, in 
many regions less obvious, it seems to be com- 
pacted of loyalties. This it is, I believe, that 
makes our boys seem more earnest, while less 
serious, than the English student; that makes 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



them seem naive in contrast with older men 
who have Hved in a world where ends are fol- 
lowed less blindly. The difference is not to 
their discredit. Once there came into my class 
of good-natured, immature sophomores, a Rus- 
sian who had taken part in the revolution, and 
escaped with just his life and his revolutionary 
ardor. At first the contrast between this 
desperate idealist, who knew how to use wea- 
pons, manage men, risk lives for a cause, and 
these well-fed youngsters who had never con- 
ceived of any social order but their own, was 
almost ludicrous. When he spoke in his quick, 
sharp voice, they squirmed uneasily in their 
seats. It seemed unfair that ideas (for he had 
them) should assail them on their unprotected 
rear! But as I thought the contrast over, the 
difference lessened. Their blind loyalty to one 
another, to their captains, to their college and 
its spirit, differed, after all, only in object and 
in maturity from his; in its way was just as 
fine. 

I do not mean that the loyalty of the under- 
graduate appears in the form of emotion or 
sentimentality. Talk about "the dear old 
college" and "my old chum" has been given 

7 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

the expressive epithet "rah rah," and laughed 
out of the vocabulary — at least in the more 
sophisticated institutions. The undergraduate, 
indeed, has become a man of the world. He 
hides his feelings except at the football-games; 
his talk is, half of it, badinage; and he is won- 
derfully successful at seeming to take life with 
no seriousness whatsoever. Furthermore, there 
are the cynics, and the prematurely mature, 
who wonder very rightly, like a character in a 
recent college novel, whether the college isn't 
there to serve them, and not they the college. 
Nevertheless, this subterranean loyalty flows 
under the whole college structure, and wells up 
in the most surprising persons and places. To 
act against the "spirit" of the place is the un- 
pardonable sin. "He has a pretty poor spirit" 
is the current anathema. Not to come out 
for a team, or an editorial board, or a musical 
club, if one has the ability, is damning — and 
almost incomprehensible. To be snobbish is 
to be unpopular— not on moral grounds, but 
because it hurts the tradition of democracy 
(democracy means "being civil to one's class- 
mates ") which every American college believes 
that it alone conserves. To be lazy, to be over- 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



studious, to be dissolute, to be spendthrift, all 
offend in some subtle or obvious fashion the 
spirit of loyalty. Loyalty unites itself in the 
subconsciousness with the desire for social 
honors — the Mammon of our colleges — and is 
an inextricable part of the motives of those 
whose chief ambition is to make this society 
or that. It accounts for much of the strength 
of college friendships. It is a powerful lever to 
pry a man up in the world after graduation, and 
many among us have been kept moving ahead 
by the old college feeling that one must be loyal 
to the expectations of one's friends. In stories 
of broken - ribbed quarter - backs and water- 
logged crews the thing has been sentimentalized 
until it is hard to make it appear the simple 
fact of college life and the all-pervading force 
that it is. But however we may dislike some 
of the results, or deplore some of the ends and 
ideals of college loyalty, it is folly and destruc- 
tion to attack it, or depreciate in the least 
degree its remarkable value for American life. 
The energy and the loyalty of the undergraduate 
are like the waters of a mountain stream. Run- 
ning wild, they are wasteful and dangerous, 

though, to complete the figure, highly pic- 

9 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

turesque. Dry them up, or fight them back, 
and you do no good to any one; harness or 
direct them, and you will have a tremendous 
power at your command. 

But how? I am not so rash as to attempt a 
final answer to that question. I am content 
at this point to maintain that until we prize 
what we have it is useless to criticize the under- 
graduate. And I hope to make clear that even 
then we must carry our criticism beyond an 
analysis of faults. 

These are said to be many and black. To 
begin with, it must be admitted, even by those 
who are most in sympathy with him, that much 
of the undergraduate's energy is undeniably 
wasted. I say "much" advisedly, for it is 
mere pedagogery to suppose that all effort not 
directed toward intellectual development is 
wasted. Nevertheless, far too much of this col- 
lege energy is burned as incense for the lesser 
gods. Interpret education as broadly as you 
will, even then it is difficult to reconcile a mad 
endeavor to do something and be something in 
the estimation of the little college community 
with any true function of the college. It is the 
approval of their classmates that our under- 

10 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



graduates seek, the approval and the material 
reward of approval: an election to a society, 
which means in this college world comfortable 
self-respect and an assured position, and in the 
next, the outer world, valuable friendships, 
useful connections that one does not have to 
wait for graduation to appreciate. Not that 
this approval is undesirable. You wish it for 
your son — and no one can blame you. But 
a student body that seeks social recognition 
as an end is likely to be somewhat uncritical 
of the activities that public opinion approves. 
It is hard enough to fulfil the requirements for 
success, without the added labor of estimating 
their value. It is much easier to plunge along 
blindly, do what is expected of you, and drown 
your critical faculties in busyness, than to 
reason out the true serviceableness of your 
efforts to the college or yourself. 

They waste much of their energy, these 
undergraduates, because their range of sym- 
pathies, of interests, of ambitions, is too narrow. 
No one expects a boy of seventeen, just enter- 
ing college, to be especially broad-minded; but 
though the vision of the Freshman and the 

Sophomore and the Junior grows clearer and 

11 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

truer, it broadens very slowly, and sometimes 
not at all. This last statement would be 
ludicrously untrue of individuals. Of the ma- 
jority of college students it is true. They are 
narrow in their sympathies; and under exist- 
ing conditions this is also not unnatural. Who 
expects the average youth of, say, twenty to 
be thoroughly sympathetic with art, literature, 
music, research; or with economics, politics, 
and the principles of finance; more especially 
when all these activities have scarcely touched 
him at home.^^ As a thoughtful senior once 
said : " In summer, when I go home, it seems as 
if no one outside cared about the things you 
try to interest us in here." Fortunately we are 
on the eve of a "gro wing-up" of our student 
body. A great and important change has 
begun in our universities in the past ten years. 
One's classes "feel" differently. They re- 
spond, however irregularly, to the intellectual, 
the scientific, the esthetic appeal. The sym- 
phony concerts, the good plays, the "outside 
lectures" have a larger and larger following. 
In the Elizabethan Club recently founded at 
Yale, where for the first time (there at least) 
graduates and undergraduates meet upon an 

12 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



equal basis of club membership, the talk is 
various and good; and the best talk, I think, 
comes from the boys. The undergraduate's 
vision is narrow, but it is narrow because his 
sympathies are too often dormant — and the 
fault is not his. 

It is their ideals of which, with more justice, 
one complains — their ideals which the very 
blindness of their loyalty prevents them from 
estimating truly. I was present not long ago 
at a class meeting where certain leaders were 
urging the men to get out and do something 
worthy of their class. An eager youth jumped 
to his feet, ran his hands through his hair, and 
burst forth: "Look here, you fellows, there's 
the Y. M. C. A. That's a college activity. 
You ought to go to the meetings. You fellows 
that aren't out for the teams or the musical 
clubs ought to see whether you can't do some- 
thing there. It's a good thing, anyhow, and 
religious and all that; but what I'm saying is 
that it's a college activity and ought to be sup- 
ported. Where's your spirit, anyhow!" As 
I listened, I saw in imagination the spirit of 
the elder D wight recoiling in horror from this 
profanity; of the reverend president Ezra 

13 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

Stiles, calling for a sign from Heaven to pro- 
claim the blasphemer preordained to damnation. 
But it was not blasphemy. My youth was 
speaking according to his lights. Supporting 
the college, as he understood iU was a duty 
beyond which he could not see. 

It is scarcely necessary to point out the 
effect of this uncritical loyalty upon the under- 
graduate's attitude toward the curriculum. 
The results have often been described — al- 
though often with more vehemence than truth. 
Let me say, however, as emphatically as I can 
say it, that the current idea of the student who 
never studies, never is interested in his work, 
is nonsense. A very respectable quantity 
of honest studying is accomplished in our 
American colleges. The observers who think 
differently are often deceived by the fashionable 
pose which dictates that a man shall say to his 
fellow, "Don't know a thing about the lesson," 
no matter how hard he may have worked the 
night before. Neither in England nor in 
Germany (at least in the universities) are 
there so few men who get through with little 
or no study at all. As for quality, that is a 
different question. Intellectual broadening, 

14. 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



mental training, culture, and all that a college 
in its strict sense is designed to achieve, get 
just the loyalty and enthusiasm to which their 
places among the various "college activities" 
entitle them. They have a place. Only the 
men who do not count neglect them. But 
they stand below the extra-curriculum activ- 
ities. They are overshadowed by the lesser 
gods. 

Again this applies to the mass only. Individ- 
uals, hundreds of them, do not come into the 
scope of this criticism. I could pick at a 
moment's notice groups of men from our best 
colleges to meet any objection — whether of 
educator, esthete, man of the world, scholar, 
or business man — which might be brought 
against college life and college education. 
Individuals, the student Dogberrys, whose 
ridiculous themes get into print, whose spellings 
are hawked about for the amusement of their 
elders, who write letters to the papers and sign 
themselves, "Yours respectiyely," do not enter 
into it. They are exceptions. They are the 
product not of the college, but of defective 
schools, or, more frequently, defective homes. 
Nevertheless, the immature, the dangerously 

2 15 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

narrow ideals are there, and they strongly 
affect, if they do not make, the pubHc opinion 
of the undergraduate world. You cannot 
blink them away, and they control and direct 
too much of the energy and too much of the 
loyalty in itself above praise. 

Who is to blame .^ First and foremost, only 
in small part, the undergraduate. He is a 
creature of his environment, past and present. 
The faculty, then? In some measure, of course. 
Given a faculty of mighty teachers, men of 
intense personality, of real intellectual eminence, 
and we would send our false gods scurrying. 
They do retreat in every college before the 
attacks of this man or that who succeeds in 
making literature or economics as vital (and this 
is difficult) as baseball or a Senior society. But 
a faculty made up of such individuals would 
be like Cromwell's army — every man a potential 
general. It can't be done — especially at the 
price we are willing to pay for them. Fur- 
thermore, many a professor enlisted for peace, 
not for war; and when one considers what is 
expected from modern scholarship, who can 
blame him for disliking to spend all his energies 
in battle with those who do not care to learn .^ 

16 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



Let us not excuse the faculty, however, but 
rather hold them in reserve for another dis- 
cussion. 

Who else is to blame? The schools? Their 
problem is quite certainly the same as that of 
the colleges. We change the venue without 
settling the case, by calling them into question. 
The parents and the home? Here we seem to 
reach one terminal, at least. For what did you 
send your son to college? To be educated, 
of course. But, in all honesty, what is the 
meaning of college education for you? Were 
you not content to have him take a degree, 
without too close questioning as to how he 
took it? Were you not, on the other hand, 
eager that he should live to the full the much- 
vaunted "college life," achieving his part of 
popularity and social success? Be sure that 
your half-expressed desires will become guid- 
ing principles for him. He knows and fears 
two public opinions, his school's and yours. 
If, in your guidance, a little conventional talk 
about doing well in his studies (easily said and 
easily seen through) fails to hide a far greater 
desire that he shall "make a society" and be 
popular in his class, how in any justice can you 

17 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

complain if the intellectual influences of the 
college pass over him and do no more than wet 
his plumage? In your capacity of bank pres- 
ident or superintendent or lawyer, you ask for 
men who have been trained to think, who are 
mentally better and broader for their educa- 
tion. In your capacity of father, do you not 
send your boys to college with the well-under- 
stood agreement that they shall be straight, 
energetic, and socially successful (admirable 
aims in themselves), and the further under- 
standing that they shall do nothing to prevent 
the faculty from educating them? But no 
one was ever educated by merely consenting 
to the operation! The will to believe may be 
an end in itself; the will to be educated is only 
the first step in the process. 

I do not wish to seem sourly pedagogical, 
or opposed to the joy of living which should 
be in the blood of every man in college. Nor 
would I minimize the enduring pleasure of 
college life, which, though a sentimental glam- 
our may have been thrown upon it by the lime- 
light of romantic fiction, is certainly one of the 
most picturesque and most likable features of 

America to-day. If it came to a question 

18 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



between efficiency and happiness in college, I 
for one should hesitate. It is not a little thing 
to have felt the Falstaffian joy: "Gallants, 
lads, boys, hearts of gold, all the titles of good 
fellowship come to you! What, shall we be 
merry!" And it is not necessary to be Falstaff 
in order to possess it in college. But it does 
not come to such a question. There is no fear 
that intellectual interests will make joyless, 
sallow bookworms of our undergraduates. As 
a figure in argument, the "grind" has been 
overworked. He exists, of course, but his real 
activity is in the mind of the bluffer, the shirker 
of intellectual labor, who, imagining a soulless 
engine quite different from the mild and plod- 
ding original, shudders at what he has escaped. 
The fun in college life is in no danger of sup- 
pression. It is unsuppressible. One wonders 
if there might not be even a little more if the 
competition for teams and crews were less 
killing; if there were more time for the imagina- 
tion to play. The successful men in college 
do not seem to be very happy. Most of them 
— especially the athletes — are overworked! 
It is a concerted attempt by faculty and 

parents that we need. A model curriculum 

19 



COLLEGE SONS AND COI.LEGE FATHERS 

will not do it. We have altered and system- 
atized our curriculums, since the break-up of 
the old classical courses left chaos behind, 
until the efficiency should have increased fifty 
per cent. Teaching in nearly all subjects has 
had energy poured into it, until one expects 
every year to see some result commensurate 
with the expenditure of devotion, and in no 
satisfying way discovers one. In truth, we 
have to work harder at our teaching than in 
the days when students were eager to be taught 
— and that we have kept the colleges from 
going backward is at least not discreditable. 
But in so far as all this regards methods and 
systematization, it is just machinery, effective 
and laudable, but machinery. We have splen- 
did devices for leading the horse to water — but 
he must wish to taste of the Pierian spring 
before we can make him drink. 

It is upon the aims and the ideals of the boy 
that we must work. Send him to college 
believing that you believe in broadening the 
intellect, in training the mind, in deepening the 
appreciation of life, and it will be relatively 
easy (for no healthy animal likes the preliminary 

stages) to educate him. If you want educa- 

i?0 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



tion from the colleges, see to it that your boys 
respect the fruits of education when they arrive. 
And yet it is unjust to fall into the scolding 
vein and charge fathers and mothers with con- 
ditions for which they are only partly re- 
sponsible. The final explanation of our dif- 
ficulty is to be found in the peculiar social and 
intellectual circumstances of American life in 
this generation; and this is at the same time 
the most encouraging and the most discourag- 
ing feature of the situation. No need to re- 
peat at length what has often been said. Bred 
of democracy, fostered by the best in our na- 
tional ambitions, a passionate desire to educate 
every one, first built up our school system and 
then burst upon the colleges. This was good; 
but it has been followed and accompanied by 
an equally passionate desire on the part of a 
prosperous generation to set the mark of 
gentility upon its sons. And the easiest, be- 
cause the best recognized way, has been to 
send them to college. To criticize the desire 
is to criticize the American plan. But when — 
as so often — it has been blind; when the col- 
lege has been regarded as a finishing-school, 
and the nature of the desired finish determined 

21 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

upon grounds in which real intellectual training 
and true culture have had small part, then the 
results are what I have been trying to outline 
in the previous paragraphs. It is an error not 
unlike that of the undergraduate: an admirable 
ambition, prompted by loyalty to the American 
spirit, backed by praiseworthy energy, directed 
toward a goal over which our educational 
leaders shake their heads. 

Well, it is not so black a business as the 
excited rhetoric into which a teacher naturally 
falls (and here apologizes for) would make it 
appear. God's in His heaven, a great deal 
of excellent education is squeezing somehow 
or other into the pores of an awe-inspiring num- 
ber of fine young fellows. If it were not that 
the days of easy success were passing; if it 
were not that the English, the French, and the 
German competition was beginning to mean 
something; if it were not that we Americans, 
having made our country, are finding that we 
do not yet know how to live in it, why, then 
there would be little sense in all this sound 
and fury. But all these things are true, and 
soon will be pressing. 

What is the remedy? In principle, it is very 

2« 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



simple; in detail and practice, excessively 
difficult; and it is quite beyond my power 
or my purpose to turn it into a formula to fit 
the manifold conditions of our many colleges. 
Surely the remedy is to guide the current instead 
of fighting against it. Bergson has convinced 
many of us that the elan vital, the life-force, 
is far too subtle to be comprehended by the 
mathematical laws of science. And the boy 
is the elan vital! We must realize that these 
waves of misguided enthusiasm which beat 
through our colleges are part of the national 
life, and cannot be made to run backward. 
We must swing their energy toward some 
worthy purpose. It is a weary thing for the 
tired teacher to say, but to succeed we must 
intellectualize the business and scientific energy 
of the country (for it is just that which the 
undergraduate displays in his blind and im- 
mature fashion). We must intellectualize it 
as a century ago the colleges intellectualized 
the professional and theological energy. And 
we must teach the student how to live, not the 
life of Greece or Rome or Victorian England, 
but the life his time and his country allow him. 
In comparison, it is relatively easy to make 
83 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

the undergraduate feel that the things of the 
mind are at least as interesting as the things 
of the body. But to do this we must have 
teachers of the first water; we must have, 
above all, the influences of the home back of us. 
We must have time and intelligent support. 
In the mean while — even though the Pharisees 
rage — do not be too severe upon our strenuous, 
lovable undergraduate. Do not minimize col- 
lege life; rather help us to vitalize it. 

Along toward the end of Senior year they 
begin to come out to see you, the boys that you 
have grown to know well and be fond of. And 
after a cigarette or two, and a preliminary 
skirmish on the prospects of the crew, or last 
summer in Switzerland, or some new book, 
out comes the real difficulty. They are nervous 
about next year. They feel hopelessly in- 
capable, untrained, ignorant. The things they 
have learned to do well have lost their price. 
Of course they joke about it, and so do you, 
but the feeling is there underneath. It is then 
that you realize most keenly their mistakes 
and your own; then that you feel what a 
delicate mechanism a man is, and how difficult 
to throw into gear. And it is only when they 

24 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 



are leaving, only when they begin to wake up 
to what will be required of them, that they 
reach the mood for education, the mood in 
which even we blundering professors could 
make education a success! This is what I 
regret. 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 
BACKGROUND 

IT must have occurred to many to explore 
the background of the Freshman's mind, 
but in the midst of endless discussions of pre- 
paratory schools, entrance examinations, and all 
the vast and creaking machinery of American 
secondary education I find little mention of it. 
Perhaps the results have seemed too confused 
for publication. Perhaps — and this, as I sit 
and look at my Freshman class, I feel to be the 
true reason — a fear of the blank and empty 
stretches which may lie behind their agreeable 
faces, a dread of discovering just how little 
background the undergraduate does possess, 
has silenced the timorous pedagogue. 

Occasionally I nerve myself to overcome this 
hesitancy, prepare for shocks and disillusion- 
ments, apply my probe, and proceed to reach 
the minds of that Freshman class, which squirms 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

and writhes as I proceed. They are not alto- 
gether discouraging, the results of that opera- 
tion. I find much valuable and interesting 
material, even when I cannot discover the in- 
tellectual equipment that the college has 
specified. The youth who confuses Dogberry 
and doggerel has well-developed opinions on 
morality. He who describes the Puritans in 
terms of the Salvation Army is nevertheless a 
shrewd judge of human nature. And that 
quiet fellow in the corner, who belongs to a new 
and more intellectual America, names an opera 
or a symphony or a good book with a familiar- 
ity which makes me blush for the crude rawness 
of my own days as an American undergraduate. 
But he is only one, and well-nigh everywhere 
else I find a bleak ignorance — redeemed, some- 
times, by shrewdness, persistence, and business 
ability, but very different from the sympathetic 
interest in knowledge and the arts which should 
be found in a boy who is ready to enter college. 
When we declare, after examination in a 
number of definite subjects, that a boy is ready 
to enter our institution, and then are displeased 
with the result, it is this deficiency in back- 
ground, I think — this poverty in intellectual 

27 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

interests — that makes the trouble. It is this 
that explains why so much effort is wasted in 
American colleges. Our teaching is strewn upon 
a bare and barren hinterland, where, finding no 
soil to root in, it dries up and blows away. 
And if a liberal education displays itself in so 
many college graduates as neither liberal nor 
an education, here is one cause that it is folly 
to neglect. 

I never fully appreciated the importance 
of the Freshman's background until the ex- 
igencies of bachelor life lodged me for some 
years in the midst of a college dormitory. In 
those years I made what was, for me, a great 
discovery in undergraduate psychology. I 
learned that many a boy had gone through a 
long and expensive preparation for college 
with no perceptible effect on his intellectual 
interests; and this made me realize that a 
college course must possess and fructify those 
desert regions where the Freshman intellect 
pursues its nomadic way, or be a waste of time 
that might as profitably be spent at the 
"movies" or the ball-game. It was a dis- 
couraging conviction for a young and hard- 
worked teacher; but it was the truth. 

28 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

There were a dozen or so of us living in a 
kind of prairie-dog settlement about a great 
central living-hall on which all our rooms 
opened. I was proctor, but under the influence 
of a common living-room the rigid barriers 
which separate the teacher and the taught 
weakened, and sometimes broke down. There 
were talks while we shaved, informal calls in 
dressing-gown or sweater, and (for better 
evidence) conversations outside my closed door, 
where the Freshman revealed himself to the 
reflective instructor with startling clarity. It 
was a highly differentiated gathering: West, 
East, South, and many schools had contributed 
to my family. One is a writer of rising distinc- 
tion now, another a mining-engineer, a third 
a successful business man, a fourth (I should 
judge) one of the pillars of the Tenderloin. 
As their divergent careers indicate, they dif- 
fered as much, one from another, as boys can 
differ, which is only a little less than men; and 
yet one statement could be made for nearly 
all: the sympathies, the prejudices, the knowl- 
edge they had gained at home or among their 
schoolmates, had little to do with the things 
they had learned at school. It was the first 

29 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

that made their background. It was there 
that they were living. The second — their 
formal training — was held in suspension, wait- 
ing, and often waiting vainly, to pass into the 
life processes. 

The gulf between their thought and their 
so-called education showed itself only too 
clearly. Sometimes the talk would go on 
for hour after endless hour in trivialities of 
"prep-school" gossip, second-hand comment 
on college athletics, wearisome disputes as to 
who said this or who said that, in which no one 
was interested — without a suggestion of the 
new ideas that college was supposed to be giving 
them. But this was merely the reticence or 
the fatigue of active spirits. Often enough, 
if personality came into the discussion, or prej- 
udice, or achievements that touched their 
imaginations, they would take fire; and when 
I talked with them alone, it was seldom that 
some vitality of interest did not reveal itself. 
But in ideas — esthetic, intellectual, commercial, 
for I tried them all — they were not interested. 

It was in these talks that I came to under- 
stand the magnitude of the teacher's problem. 
Thanks to the narrowness of their interests, 

30 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

the subject-matter of civilization — history, Kt- 
erature, science — was not at home in their 
minds. They received instruction as the Es- 
kimo receives the arts of the white man — po- 
Htely, but with some suspicion and not a little 
contempt. And yet, unless our teaching en- 
tered into and became a part of their back- 
grounds, it did not live beyond the cooling of 
the breath. I quickly discovered that the 
lesson which touched no chord of previous 
sympathy had to fight all the forces of youthful 
indifference, and speedily dropped away. I 
soon learned that a quickening appreciation 
was due as much to some old influence which 
time had welded into the brain as to the teacher 
who awoke it. And when there was nothing 
to work upon we worked in vain. 

The banker's son from New York was clear- 
sighted and quick of comprehension, but he 
had lived his life amid ideals of profit and 
physical pleasure. The moral philosophy of 
English literature shed from his brain like water 
from a roof. The son of the Montana miner 
had a heart of gold and common sense worth 
millions, but he had come from an over-practical 

world which recognized the abstract only when 
3 31 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

it was sentimentaL Thought about religion 
or atoms or politics or poetry passed through 
his head and left never a path behind it. 
And there was one youth, by no means 
the most intellectual, or even the most lika- 
ble, who seemed to clinch the argument. He, 
it seemed, had lived in a family where food, 
business, reprimand, and complaint had not 
been the only topics of conversation. His mind 
was stored with vague interests in politics, 
science, art, vague ambitions toward knowing 
"why things were so," and how to control them; 
interests and ambitions worthless in themselves 
because of their very vagueness. He knew 
nothing definite, he could do nothing well, he 
had always been at the middle of his classes; 
he was, so he thought, and with justice, 
mediocre. Nevertheless, that boy was getting 
educated while the rest of them were merely 
being trained. From his position of inferiority 
he was advancing, and he advanced, abreast 
of and then beyond them. It may have been 
delayed ability. I do not think so. It was 
rather that, thanks to the sympathies which 
had been rooted in his mind, his thoughts were 
hospitable to education. I doubt whether he 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

has made as much money as the rest of them. 
He lacked shrewdness for that. But I know 
that he got more from his education; and I 
think that he is doing more with his Hfe. 

That boy had background — a background 
not so much of knowledge and experience, 
though all that he had was valuable, as of 
awakened intellectual desires. The others, with 
slight exceptions, had not. It did not make 
them less excellent fellows to know and to live 
with. It did not affect their common sense or 
their morality. But it did make them less 
interesting to talk to; for once outside a narrow 
range of athletics, travel, or mutual acquaint- 
ances, they did not react. And, oh, what a 
difference when it came to educating them! 
It was painful to know that, failing to reach the 
distant background where the boy was living, 
our ardor was flung away for trivial results. 
But at least it explained the many, many 
disappointments, and nerved one to assault 
more intelligently the well-guarded citadel 
where lurked the minds of the Freshman class. 

I had been too recently an undergraduate 
myself to feel rancor. It seemed the established 
order that a boy should come to college keenly 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

alive to its social possibilities, and indifferent 
to ideas and to culture. It seemed a notable 
triumph for the university when I considered 
how many men of my college generation had 
emerged with minds that were sweetened, 
made liberal, filled full of useful interests, and 
ready to discriminate among the values of life. 
I praise my university a little less now that, 
being part of her, I realize the things she did 
not, perhaps could not, do for us. But against 
the "established order" and its self-satisfied 
indifference I am in revolt. 

Why should the universities have to take 
over from good schools and comfortable homes 
so much sodden clay into which only a new 
creation could put the breath of intellectual 
life.^ Why should they have to press their 
wares upon the unwilling student like patent- 
medicine venders.^ Is it fair, is it honest, is it 
wise to send them boys who might want educa- 
tion, yet do not; who might be interested in 
knowledge, yet are not; whose habit of mind 
is opposed to all cultivation not directly 
associated with elementary pleasure or dollars 
and cents .^ The critics say. If you gave them an 

education adapted to modern life they would 

34 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

not be indifferent to it. Alas! if in the in- 
tellectual loafers among our undergraduates 
I could discover an interest in any kind of 
education, I should be more optimistic. 

I am not complaining of the preparation 
of our undergraduates, in the strict, scholastic 
sense of the word. That is our problem. I 
freely admit that the schools might teach them 
more, and I know, of course, that better educa- 
tional methods would enrich their backgrounds 
as well as increase their knowledge. Indeed, 
I see a dozen instances in my Freshman classes 
where this has been true, especially among 
boys who have been subjected to the superior 
discipline and richer education of a European 
school. The trouble fundamentally is not here — 
it is in the home. In the first of these essays I 
said, with as much restraint as the ruflfled spirit of 
a weary teacher would permit, that the parents 
who sent their boys to college to "make a so- 
ciety" and become "good mixers" were unjust, 
then and afterward, to the boys and to the college. 
They are also chiefly to blame, these parents, for 
the weak and pallid background of the under- 
graduate. And it is in the home that children 
learn a bad philosophy of getting educated. 

35 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

To speak of a "philosophy of getting educated" 
in boys of seventeen is not so foolish as it sounds. 
The Freshmen, consciously or unconsciously, 
have a very definite attitude toward "learning 
things," and that attitude is their philosophy. 
Try them and you will quickly find that they 
have taken their stand already as regards 
"culture" and "mental discipline," just as they 
have taken their stand in moral matters. I do 
not refer to what they say. The undergradu- 
ates will maintain as one man that "culture" 
is desirable. The most flagrantly epicurean 
and wilfully Philistine members of my class 
will cheerfully assert in writing, and over their 
signatures, that from the bottom of their hearts 
they believe "a man ought to broaden his mind 
by studying a number of subjects" in college. 
And the laziest Senior, after an evening at a 
cafe or the "movies," will stroll over to the 
class polls next morning, humming "In this 
college life there is rest," and cheerfully vote 
that Phi Beta Kappa was what he most desired 
in college! I mean, of course, what they feel, 
as indicated by what they do. And it is not 
usually the school that makes the striking 
differences which appear — differences ranging 

36 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

from a warm and fruitful appreciation to a dull 
and indifferent spirit. It is the philosophy 
which they drew from their background — 
which is to say, from their environment, and 
most of all from their homes. 

American parents might echo the regretful 
words of King Lear, who had "ta'en too little 
care" of the social errors ripening before his 
unseeing eyes. Like "big business," and the 
exploiters of our natural resources, they have 
allowed the period of excessive individualism 
now drawing to a close to lead them into serious 
errors of omission and commission. In the 
nineteenth century, religious education in the 
home, with the incidental culture that accom- 
panied it, began to decline. Its place was 
taken by an almost superstitious faith in the 
power of the college and the school. Thousands 
of American parents who professed to desire 
cultivation for their sons and daughters, chose 
— through modesty or laziness — the method of 
laissez-faire, and shifted their responsibility 
upon formal education. The mother was busy 
learning the ways and means of the new 
luxury which in the '80's began to be obligatory 
for socially ambitious Americans; tlie fathey 

37 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

was still busier, earning the wherewithal for 
the process. Both, in many instances — I judge 
by results — ^gladly welcomed these insidious 
theories of individualism in education. Let 
us put the boy in a good school, they said, 
where of course he will become educated. Then, 
having spared no expense in the effort to give 
him the best in the market, they washed their 
hands of the whole affair, and, unless he was 
dropped or expelled, concerned themselves 
no more with the matter. The result is the 
college problem of to-day — a profusion of well- 
dressed, well-mannered boys, fairly well-trained, 
fairly well-stocked in mind, but devoid of any 
active interest whatever in their education. 

The mistake was to suppose that a school alone 
could give them background. By what miracle 
of education could these children of parents in- 
different to knowledge and scornful of culture 
be endowed in the schools with the thing that 
all their early environment had taught them 
to neglect or despise! It was too late. Instruc- 
tion, like a thunder-storm above rocky summits, 
rutnbled and burst upon their impervious heads, 
and only the mental habits of their boy com- 
panions, with minds as immature as their own, 

3§ 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

really influenced their ways of thinking. Thus 
at school they lived in a barbarous age of their 
own and their friends' creating, where light, 
learning, and scientific truth were viewed 
much as the Crusaders, who stamped Greek 
bronzes into coin and burned marbles for lime, 
regarded the beauty and the civilization of 
ancient Constantinople. The laissez-faire meth- 
od, as I have described it, may have increased 
self-confidence, favored manliness, and saved 
time and worry for the American parent, but 
as a cultural process it was thoroughly in- 
efl&cient. 

Well, what is to be done about it.^^ Let us 
suppose that we desire culture, by which I 
mean no mere affectation of knowledge, nor 
any power of glib speech, or idle command 
of the fopperies of art and literature, but, 
rather, an intelligent interest in the possibilities 
of living. Indeed, there is no raison d^etre for 
the college of liberal arts if there is no such 
desire. Well, what is to be done? Buy a 
library, redecorate the living-room, adopt the 
broad a, enter the whole family in the nearest 
summer school, and take the boys to "Gotter- 
dammerung" instead of to the ball-game? 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

Such a method of providing a background in a 
hurry has been tried, with results that our 
native playwrights have failed to grasp only 
because their fondness for melodrama has 
dulled their sense of humor. 

And yet even a college professor can see 
remedies — partial, to be sure, yet remedies 
that will bring relief. 

The first is to be honest. If you are content 
with an education for your children that gives 
a certain amount of superficial information, 
to be acquired while they are making friends, 
advancing socially, and preparing to come out 
of college "good mixers," if not educated men 
and women, why, then, be honest about it, 
teach them to be honest, and do not deceive 
yourself or them into supposing that it is cul- 
ture you are after, or culture that they have 
got. For some undergraduates this is the 
best, indeed it is the only course, though for 
most it is perdition. Some minds can absorb, 
and some will absorb, no more than a certain 
measure, even though deans and faculties and 
educational journals rage. Once they get 
into college, one must make the best of them. 
The college will suffer. But then education 

40 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

has always had to carry dead weight, and will 
continue to do so until some new economic 
order makes it necessary for every one to work 
for a living. 

If the lazy-minded are honest, they are not 
dangerous — one learns to accept them, like 
humidity and flies. It is the men who are not 
honest that corrupt college life, the men who 
wish to turn college into a social institution 
and call that culture, or into an athletic compe- 
tition and call that education, or into a mold 
of character or good manners, and call that 
intellectual training. If they were honest with 
themselves, if you were honest with them, 
they could not be so deluded. They would 
either frankly admit that their goal was not 
intellectual development, and so become less 
dangerous; or turn more of their admirable 
energies into training the mind, and so become 
really valuable; or stay away from college. 
I do not believe that many are the worse for 
their college course, since our undergraduate 
life has a wonderful vigor and sweetness, which 
enriches often where it does not educate. 
But such men can do incalculable harm tg 

their colleges. 

41 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

Of course there are many fathers — especially 
among business men — who frankly do not 
believe in culture, and who are quite willing 
that their children should get the associations 
of college life with the modicum of cultivation 
v/hich cannot be escaped. I have another and 
equally serious quarrel with them, which de- 
mands more space than this essay can afford. 
They at least are honest. Their prejudices 
are due to a well-grounded distrust of the in- 
tellectual fops and dry-as-dust pedants who 
will sometimes develop as excrescences upon the 
cultural process. Or, if not prejudice, it is a 
wilful ignorance of what the colleges mean by 
culture that misleads them, and a wilful blind- 
ness to the kind of intellect that will be re- 
quired of the next generation. But my quar- 
rel here is with the parents who profess to 
believe in college education. 

If, being such a parent, you are not content 
with the ambiguous training desired by the 
advocate of "country-club colleges"; if you 
belong to the new generation which has begun 
to realize that the complexities and competi- 
tions of modern life are crying for intelligence 
to master them, and that even millions are 

42 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

growing difficult to spend; if you demand a 
training for your children that will stir the 
inner virtues of the mind — why, then, two 
courses are open. Granted schools and colleges 
as good as one can provide — and they are not 
yet good enough for the splendid material that 
America is breeding — it is indispensable that 
there be, in addition, either background, with 
all it implies, or a heartfelt desire for educa- 
tion. 

Now it should not be difficult to give the cur- 
rent Freshman a proper background. Colleges 
in America have spread with incredible rapidity. 
But they have spread no faster than homes 
where all the appliances of civilization are at 
hand. The background of culture, thanks 
largely to our women, is available in many, 
if not in most, families of moderate means. 
But, unfortunately, it is not yet our background. 
We are a little restive before it — suspicious of 
its refinements, contemptuous of its luxuries. 
It is like a new fashion, worn awkwardly, scorn- 
fully, by practical men, if worn at all. And 
the hearty young barbarians, who always 
imitate those they love best, magnify our sus- 
picions, our contempts, and go off to school 

43 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

and college with that for their intellectual and 
esthetic philosophy. 

It is hard at middle age to broaden tastes, 
to become interested in thought, to learn to 
use as well as to possess the possibilities of 
living that a good income and the twentieth 
century put before us. And yet, if the chil- 
dren are to be given a fair start in the more 
intellectual period that is certainly coming, 
the effort must be contemplated. Unless they 
are strong enough to break away from their 
first environment — and many are not — school 
alone will never bring culture with it, nor will 
college. 

The families who lack the apparatus and the 
atmosphere of fine living, whether through the 
hampering poverty of a tenement flat or the 
distracting riches of a new-made million, are 
handicapped, perhaps, but in no sense deprived 
of the opportunity to give education a fair 
chance. They may not be able to insure for 
their children a background rich in experience 
of the arts of life, but they can inculcate the 
desire for one; and in youth, desire is even bet- 
ter than possession. There may be bad pictures 
on the wall, cheap books on the shelves, narrow 

44 

V 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

talk or none at all at table, and yet the boy 

who emerges from such an environment may 

be surer of awakening his intellectual being 

than the son of an art-collector or a patron of 

symphony concerts — if he really wants to be 

educated. Neither poverty nor riches is the 

determining factor. In either case, the wish 

to know truly and to feel truly can be instilled, 

if there is the will to instil it. And such a 

longing wins against any odds. 

In one respect, at least, the youth who must 

fight his way out of utter Philistinism, or the 

barren environment of the poor, is better off 

than he who enters college already acquainted 

with the liberal arts. He has rubbed, and 

rubbed hard, against the basic necessities of 

life — need of food, need of clothes, need of 

money — or at least his parents have made him 

familiar with those incorrigible realities which 

came before the arts and will stay after them. 

And the saving practicality that comes with 

hard-earned sustenance, and remains when the 

stress and the pinch are past, will save him 

from the poses, the potterings, and the fopperies 

that accompany culture too easily won, and 

make it — what all culture seems to many 

45 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

Americans — an ornament, rather than an aid 
to a richer and more purposeful hfe. 

There is no getting round it. If we wish 
the colleges to instil culture, we must either 
become cultivated ourselves, or by some other 
means make our children desirous of culture. 
Even so, the problem will not be solved. In- 
efficient teachers will remain to be reckoned 
with, especially since we shall probably con- 
tinue to refuse to give them enough income 
to keep what culture they possess at the boiling- 
point. And there are few schools and few 
colleges in which outworn, ineffective methods 
do not here and there hold back even the willing 
mind from a full measure of accomplishment. 
The sociologist will remark that there is also 
heredity. It is still true that you cannot make 
a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and as there are 
boys who would become educated in Greenland 
or Nigeria, so, as I have already admitted, 
there are others whose brains permit of only 
a moderate education, strive as we may. But 
the psychologists and anthropologists now 
give us reason to believe what common sense 
has long taught — that the power of environ- 
ment, if not absolute, is at least greater than 

46 



THE UNDERGRADUATE BACKGROUND 

any other shaping influence upon the mind. 
Environment cannot make, though it may mar, 
genius or even talent; but a bad heredity will 
not prevent a boy in a favorable environment 
from acquiring an adequate education. 

A far more serious problem is to determine 
just what true culture is going to be for the next 
generation, so that the bewildered parent may 
adequately prepare for it. Few will agree as to 
its probable nature, and in the particular forms 
of education and environment by which we 
try to instil it there is abundant room for 
legitimate differences of opinion. But no one 
will deny, I think, that a mind eager to get at 
the truth and willing to enjoy the best is a 
chief requisite in any conceivable educational 
program. 

4 



THE PROFESSOR 

\| r I iHE college professor as he appears in 
jL American novels and upon the American 
stage is so picturesque that I should like to 
forget the dangers of the caricature. He is 
presented as a mild individual, with vacant 
eyes, an absent mind, a long beard, and untidy 
clothes. This imagined professor wears loose 
slippers in his study, and looks through steel- 
rimmed glasses on a world which does not con- 
cern him. The passions touch him not, and 
in the presence of dollars and cents or other 
facts of existence he displays a touching help- 
lessness which is charmingly humorous. He 
lives serene and untroubled among his books, 
dreams beautiful dreams, sees attractive but 
unprofitable visions, and economically and 
politically is supposed to rank with the women- 
folk, as intermediate between the real men and 
the paupers, feeble-minded, and Indians untaxed. 

48 



THE PROFESSOR 



\p\ 



The average American knows that this 
slippered gentleman is a product of the genial 
imagination of our comedy-makers, and yet 
his own conception of the college professor is 
not much nearer the truth. He imagines him, 
if my observations are correct, as a dignified 
but severe individual with a trimmed beard, 
a cold eye, and a mysterious interest in subjects 
of no earthly use to anybody. He believes 
him to be indifferent to the necessities, and 
unsympathetic with the pleasures, of every- 
day existence. Although he respects his cul- 
tivation and is impressed by the extent of his 
knowledge, in his heart of hearts he still feels, 
in spite of recent insta,nces to the contrary, 
that the professor is futile in active life, and 
therefore merely ornamental in our civilization. 
^"' The truth is that the average American 
knows very little about the college professor, 
and takes few pains to know more. My legal 
friend, who motors in and out from his country 
residence and has time for golf in the afternoon 
and the theater or reading every evening, talks 
to me enviously of the otium cum dignitate 
of life in the academic shades, and does not 
heed my ironic reply. The business man. 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

who knows that I have three months a year 
free from college duties, assumes that it is all 
vacation, and smiles indulgently when I speak 
of my summer work. In discussions of affairs 
our comments are likely to be dismissed as 
impractical — undoubtedly they often are so 
— before they are heard, on the principle that 
governed the medievals when they distrusted 
in advance all that a lawyer might have to 
say of religion. And it is clear what the finan- 
cial world thinks of us, since every wildcat 
enterprise sends its circulars to all the names on 
the college catalogue; strong evidence that it 
knows little about the college community, for 
few professors have a surplus worth stealing. 
After all, the animal does not differ so much 
from the rest of the community; in fact, he 
is scarcely a different species. The modern 
professor is more usually a man of the world 
than a recluse. He knows good cigars, as 
well as good pictures and good books. He 
enjoys his club with a very human enjoy- 
ment. As a golfer or tennis-player he is often 
above the average. His talk, if a trifle dog- 
matic and inclined to stray from the cardinal 
American topics — business, athletics, auto- 

50 



THE PROFESSOR 



mobiles, and anecdotes — is rarely pedantic, 
and far more intelligible than the dialect of 
the motorist or the jargon of baseball. If he 
wears unfashionable clothes, they more often 
indicate an unfortunate economic condition 
than a disregard of his neighbors, and when he 
holds back from social and municipal activities 
it is often for the same reason. If he is little 
skilled in commerce, at least he knows as much 
of the banker's, the lawyer's, or the manu- 
facturer's business as they do of his; perhaps 
more. Prick him in his pride, his purse, his 
likings, or his intolerances, and he will bleed 
quite as if he were a financier or a politician. 
In short, he is human. 

This being true, it is curious that he should 
be regarded as unsympathetic, as indifferent 
to the life about him. Indeed, if there is 
indifference, I believe that it is quite as much 
America's as the professor's. It is not pleasant 
to be held at arm's-length from life. It is 
irritating to meet constantly with the assump- 
tion that intellectual interests are alien to 
human nature. And the professor, not wisely, 
perhaps, but quite humanly, sometimes retal- 
iates. The business man who patronizes or is 

51 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

indifferent to the world of thought, is too often 
held in contempt among academic coteries. 
I do not defend this attitude, especially when it 
rises to superciliousness; nevertheless, it is com- 
prehensible. But the professor with whom I am 
most familiar seems to me to be almost patheti- 
cally interested in the details of practical life, as 
if anxious to confirm the theory it is his business 
to teach. And this is what one would expect 
as the result of his profession. The study of 
biology, or medieval history, or Shakespeare 
is quite as human as soap-making; teaching 
surely exercises the sympathies as much as 
managing a factory or selling land. In short, 
I am driven to the conclusion that the lack of 
harmony between the teacher and the parents 
of those he must teach begins more often with- 
out than within the colleges. Its dangers, its 
effects upon teaching, I shall touch upon later. 
I fear there is little doubt that the average 
American regards the professor as ornamental, 
and in recognizing this fact I am not so resentful 
as afraid — afraid of the results. Why deny the 
fact? Reason instructs us that some one must 
teach our children, that knowledge must be ac- 
cumulated, culture presented, thoughts set ger- 

5? 



THE PROFESSOR 



minating; but we continue to feel, nevertheless, 
that our professors are merely necessary con- 
ventions associated with the finishing-schools, 
called colleges, to which we send our boys for an 
experience which custom makes necessary, in 
the hope that they may learn what it is better 
for them to know, and emerge with the social 
position which they must possess. The place 
of the professor in this process is felt to be 
time-honored and eminently respectable. With 
the college songs, the college curriculum, and 
the college bills, he is part of the life which we 
are buying for our children. But we expect 
little more of him. If our youngsters express 
enthusiasm for his personality, his ideas, or 
his work, we are mildly uneasy, fearing the 
fanatic or the crank. I am trying to voice 
the sentiments of a typical American, which is 
to say a commercial, community; not, mind 
you, what they say, or what they think, but 
what they feel. Perhaps I am unjust, but I 
do not think so. I myself come from a business 
family and a business community. 

The results might have been as disastrous 
for the college professor as an equivalent at- 
titude has proved for certain branches of the 

53 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

clergy. The professor has been expected to be 
ornamental; it has sometimes been made clear 
that if he were content with a living wage he 
would be allowed — ^nay, encouraged — to con- 
tinue in a merely ornamental capacity. Neither 
as scholar nor as teacher has he often suc- 
cumbed to the temptation; he has usually 
been unaware of it; and this is due solely, I 
think, to the absorbing interest of modern 
scholarship, and still more to his artistic con- 
science — for teaching is an art. 

Nevertheless, as critics of our colleges have 
numerously testified, the professor has not 
satisfied America. Nor will he until America 
takes his work more seriously. The business 
of the professor consists of teaching and re- 
search. Research will probably take care of 
itself. Its results are tangible — so tangible 
that even a commercial generation is begin- 
ning to approve them — and its fascination is 
great. Furthermore, since the products of 
successful research can be weighed and tested 
with little difficulty and without undue strain 
upon the judgment, college promotions have 
been most frequently made upon an estimate 

of research. A book published is clear evi- 

5i 



THE PROFESSOR 



dence for or against a candidate. But good 
teaching is elusive, subject to false testimony, 
slow in its effects, hard to estimate, requiring 
time and trouble to search out. Hence it is 
important that the outside world should en- 
deavor to encourage the teacher, should demand 
much of him, and pay him in appreciation for 
what it gets. Hence if it thinks the teacher 
merely ornamental, it strikes a blow at him and 
itself. 

Even under circumstances that might 
dampen enthusiasm, ardent, eager teaching 
has certainly not slackened in our colleges. 
It takes more than indifference to curb an art. 
When I first began to teach, I found myself 
one of a group of youngsters, all novices and 
all enthusiasts. Some of us had consciously 
aimed from the beginning at the academic 
life; some of us had drifted into it, lured by its 
opportunities or repelled by the impossibility 
of doing elsewhere the things that interested 
us. But all were united by a common resolve. 
We had come under good teachers in school 
and college. But we had also come under bad 
teachers. And we were resolved that if we 

could not get results from our work — once we 

55 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

had mastered it — if we could not keep vivid, 
alive, and awake in the lecture chair — we would 
give up the profession and go into what those 
who have never taught call "the active life." 
I suppose that we are all a little disillusioned 
by now. I suppose all of us are uncertain, 
as at the beginning, of how much we can teach; 
that all of us are aware that the results of teach- 
ing must often be seen by the eyes of faith. 
But none of us have thrown up our profession 
and gone into the world; none of us have wished 
to do so. The art of teaching is too absorbing. 
My friends outside the college gates say to 
me, "How monotonous it must be to teach the 
same thing over and over!" Nonsense! You 
never teach the same thing twice; how can you, 
when each time it must be fitted to different 
minds? They say, "How tiresome to be always 
shouting at unwilling ears!" Tiresome! The 
more unwilling, the more adventurous is the 
effort. And even the cultural neglect in the 
American home, and the curious intellectual 
deadening that seems to occur in many 
American preparatory schools, have not made 
these student minds unwilling. Frequently 

sluggish, sometimes inattentive perhaps, but 

50 



THE PROFESSOR 



not consciously unwilling; and if unconsciously 
so, then hostile not to the teacher, but to the 
new idea or the discipline of thought. I speak 
as one largely ignorant of the battles of the 
market-place and stock-exchange, which our 
weekly story-papers have made so romantic, 
and thus am subject to correction; yet I dare 
assert that few experiences in the run of daily 
work are more stimulating, more exciting, than 
teaching. 

I do not mean that the performance is 
thrilling for the class — undergraduates quickly 
become callous to all but the strongest stimuli. 
But to the sensitive teacher the hour is charged 
with quicksilver. You see the minds of the 
thirty-odd men below you in their faces. You 
feel their response when the current of interest 
sets strongly, and your points tell. You feel 
the relapse when, one after another, they begin 
to drift away, and must be swung back, like 
particles in the field of an electro-magnet, by 
some stronger charge of electricity, some more 
vigorous effort in yourself. It is nervous 
work, but it is quite as interesting, I think, as a 
business deal or a lawsuit; and the materials 
with which one works are far more agreeable; 

57 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

the results — when there are results — of an 
importance infinitely great. 

In short, teaching is a public service in which 
enthusiasm is easy, but a service of infinite 
delicacy upon which real or apparent failure 
always waits. How essential is it that the 
public should be indifferent neither to the short- 
comings nor to the success of the teacher ! How 
important that the work into which he throws 
himself should be held more than perfunctory, 
more than ornamental ! How foolish to cool the 
eager artist at his task, when that task is, or 
should be, the shaping of the next generation! 

Indeed, the thrust goes beyond the professor. 
It is the community that suffers. The teacher 
will teach, if he is worth anything, until he is 
muzzled. And if he is a scholar he will devote 
himself to the most dijBBcult research. But the 
breed is human. They would certainly teach 
better, their research might be better directed, 
if the public, their actual employers, were less 
indifferent to their work. Ask and it shall be 
given unto you. America asks too little of the 
college professor. 

Nor is he sufficiently rewarded. I do not 

wish to harp upon the ancient theme of the 

58 



THE PROFESSOR 



underpaid professor. That plaint has grown 
tiresome to academic as well as to unaca- 
demic ears, the more so since it should never 
have been a complaint, but a warning. The 
professor is not the greatest sufferer. His 
life is primarily a life of the mind. He is in 
possession of resources not so readily opened to 
the practical man of affairs. If he cannot 
afford automobiles and the opera, nevertheless 
books, nature, and the greatest of recreations, 
thinking, are his by right of conquest and 
opportunity. If he must mix the petty ir- 
ritants of bill days, mortgage dates, and life- 
insurance payments with the proper atmosphere 
of his work, nevertheless that work is more 
purely congenial, more rewarding in itself, 
more stimulating than any other, except, per- 
haps, painting, music, or literature. It is not 
the professor who suffers most from the limi- 
tations that the lack of a true living wage 
imposes upon him; it is not even his wife. 
He is, it is true, most unfortunately cramped 
by this condition. Many and many a man 
has never taken the sabbatical year which his 
college allows him for stimulus and investiga- 
tion, because he could not afford it. I remem- 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

ber a talk of pictures, of cathedrals, of men 
and thoughts in European cities with an aging 
professor of rhetoric in a small college. Never 
have I known a man more sensitive to the 
impressions of other cultures; not many men, 
to judge from his work, have been so capable 
of turning all experience, and especially such 
experience, to profitable ends; but his talk 
was of London and Paris in the 'seventies; of 
conditions now merely historical, of men long 
dead. He had gone abroad when graduated 
from college. In forty years of service he had 
never been able to go again. Of course, if 
he had not married! But then they will marry, 
these professors! And here, too, there are 
limitations. A college statistician has recently 
asserted that on the present salary basis the 
professor can hope to afford, on the average, 
two-fifths of a child! Again, if the professor 
lives a life apart in order that he may be thrown 
neither with his economic equals, who are 
culturally and educationally his inferiors, nor 
with his educational equals, who set a financial 
pace he cannot follow — if he lives a life apart, 
he must forfeit the place in the community 
that every self-respecting citizen desires; he 

60 



THE PROFESSOR 



must forfeit influence, and condemn himself 
to a narrow society. But he is not the chief 
sufferer. With all its minor hardships, his 
life is on the whole the most attractive that 
America offers. 

The chief sufferer, of course, is the commu- 
nity. The factory of knowledge is operated for 
it. In the long run it controls the finances, 
and it controls the output. If it is pleased to 
run the plant on a short allowance of lubricant 
and fuel, there should be no quarrel with re- 
sults. The engines whir along; some of them 
as fast as they can, some of them too slowly. 
And the stockholders, having paid for the 
installation, shut up their pockets, and are 
content to criticize (with more severity than 
discrimination) the imperfectly finished product 
which their education turns out. Ask and it 
shall be given unto you. If you wish better 
education, ask for it as strenuously and as 
intelligently as you ask for dividends; pay 
reasonably for it; and you will get it. If you 
desire that this inspiring profession should be 
either crowded with incompetents or open 
only to men of independent fortunes, continue 
to keep down the wage of the professor while 

61 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

the cost of living rises and you will get just that 
result with all its attendant dangers. And, 
finally, if you wish that your colleges should 
be mere finishing-schools, be careful lest the 
enthusiasm of the professor dulls, and you get 
your wish. The profession of teaching and 
the profession of research are highly agreeable 
and highly stimulating. But, like the other 
professions, they have their full share of the 
weaknesses of human nature. They are equally 
liable to sluggishness, equally dependent upon 
the attitude of the community. Deny or 
hamper their usefulness, and they will be- 
come less useful; ask much of them, and you 
will get some part at least of that for which 
you ask. 

I have written in my first essay of the lova- 
ble, energetic, misguided undergraduate, and of 
the tact, the skill, and the guiding force which 
are necessary if he is to be really educated. 
It is here that the defects of the professor 
most quickly show themselves. And it is here 
that the already discussed attitude of average 
America toward the professor and things in- 
tellectual, an attitude that is certainly indif- 
ferent, and perhaps just a little contemptuous. 



THE PROFESSOR 



works the greatest harm. For this attitude 
makes teaching difficult, and it makes it diffi- 
cult to get good men to teach. 

A really good professor should be a Cerberus 
— three gentlemen at once. He should be 
able to teach; and though the desire to teach 
is strong and common, the power to teach, as 
we who try know, is slow of growth and rare 
in its achievement. He should be a good 
scholar; for, aside from the value of successful 
research, good teaching, as is well known, 
seldom proceeds except from a mind trained 
in fruitful investigation, deep stored with knowl- 
edge, and creative in science, in criticism, or 
in the realm of the imagination. The conflict 
between teaching and research, of which we 
hear so much, is like the conflict of science and 
religion. It exists only through a misunder- 
standing. It exists only because of the prone- 
ness of the academic authorities to recognize 
the scholarly rather than the educational man- 
ifestations of a power that all good teachers 
should possess. Finally, the professor should 
be an admirably sane, admirably broad, ad- 
mirably human individual. And, really, such 
a man is not to be had by advertising in the 

5 63 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

evening paper or by corresponding with an 
employment agency. 

Actually, the American attitude toward the 
academic profession makes the task doubly 
diflScult. Time and again American parents 
who have amassed money enough for their 
children's children, or a whole college faculty, 
are led by a curious distrust of the intellectual 
life — or is it contempt for the mere teacher? — 
to drag away the promising son who, in tastes, 
in desires, and in ability, has shown himself 
qualified for the academic profession, in order 
to thrust him into business, where against his 
will he makes more money. We, in our clois- 
tered simplicity, are at a loss to understand 
their point of view. But we understand too 
clearly the limitations thus thrust upon us 
in our search for recruits from among those to 
whom the road to culture has been open. As 
for the youth with all the qualifications but no 
money, he must be willing to risk financial 
instability, and he must make his choice at a 
time when new tastes burn within him for 
gratification, and when the desire for marriage 
and a home is like a rosy beacon urging him on 
the path to speedy independence. All this 

64 



THE PROFESSOR 



does not help the college to find material which 
at the best is rare. Time and again we see the 
men we want reluctantly turn to less congenial 
or less hazardous pursuits. 

But I would not insist upon this point. 
Perhaps by the operation of some obscure 
choice of the fittest, we draw, if not the best, at 
least the most worthy into the academic fold. 
Much more serious is the inherited attitude 
of the undergraduate. I say inherited, because 
it is not his own, as is proved by the fact that 
he loses much of it as his college experience 
progresses. It is a belief impressed upon his 
subconsciousness by his earlier environment, 
that the things of the mind are unsympathetic, 
are ornaments merely, are non-essentials. When 
his parents feel that the professor and the life 
of the professor and the thoughts of the pro- 
fessor are alien, or that a college degree is like 
the cut of a coat, useful not in itself, but only 
in its effect upon others, the circumstance 
is not hid from him. And this prejudice 
against knowledge is a barrier which the teacher 
must try, and often try vainly, to overcome 
before he can begin to teach. 

The bell strikes the hour. The class as- 

65 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

sembles. Here is a group of fresh minds in 
fresh bodies, minds half-trained or ill-trained, 
unstored or ill-stored. It is the professor's 
business to train them, to store them; and he, 
if he has acquired any wisdom in his search 
for knowledge, is aware of how little he himself 
really knows, is still more aware of the excessive 
difficulty of choosing from that little what can 
be taught, what is worth teaching to these men, 
at this time, in their mood. And he is still 
more keenly alive to the difficulties of trans- 
mission. He knows that he must tune and 
retune constantly the waves of energy which 
pass from his mind to the class, for otherwise 
those sensitive but slowly adjusting receivers 
will catch no message. Outside the class-room 
there are ever-present wars and rumors of wars 
over educational policies, systems, changing 
categories of knowledge to fit changing con- 
ditions, opinions as to what to teach as different 
as if one doctor should say, "Give the patient 
digitalis," and another, "Fill him with bro- 
mides." He must follow the course of these 
battles, take his side, urge his own opinions, 
and suffer or gain by them. But at the same 
time he knows that these are but diplomatic 

66 



THE PROFESSOR 



skirmishings, after all; that the real contest 
is in the class-room; that how much is taught 
is even more important than what is taught. 
He must decide upon what is worth teaching; 
he must also do that equally difficult and far 
more important thing, teach. Every barrier 
in the road, every brake upon his progress, is a 
hindrance to American education; and, next 
to his own shortcomings, the greatest of 
obstacles is the indifference to the means of 
education in careless, commercial America. 
Our city governments are illuminating examples 
of the results of such an attitude. Our colleges 
are instances of how much can be accomplished 
by devotion and enthusiasm in the face of it. 
I am only too well aware that the current 
American belief that the professor is unsym- 
pathetic and often merely ornamental is some- 
times justified by the facts. Some of us are 
pedantic and pragmatical. Some of us are 
indifferent to the course of events outside the 
gates, and too sure that since the heart of the 
world is unchanging, its brain is a constant also. 
Many of us are selfish in our pursuit of narrow 
research or flattering popularity; many are 
petty-minded and live upon intrigue as poli- 

67 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

ticians upon graft; many of us merely talk when 
we should be teaching. Most of us, indeed, 
have made our choice from among the teacher's 
seven deadly sins : contempt, arrogance, vanity, 
subservience, meanness, self -absorption, laziness 
— of which the greatest is contempt of the world, 
and the least popular, laziness. But almost 
to a man we are loyal to our profession, and 
we wish not fewer hours or more distinction 
or even more money (except as working capital), 
but a more active interest in our efforts, and a 
demand, which is at the same time more rigorous 
and more intelligent, for results. Ask and it 
shall be given unto you; not completely, for 
education as a science is still uncertain, and as 
an art will always remain difficult; but more 
abundantly than now. We are trying to teach 
a man how to live while being successful in 
business. We are trying to train men to find 
out what is really useful in life. Criticize, 
blame, oppose the process, and make your 
demands as exacting as you will, but do not 
be indifferent to it. Indifference is education's 
primal curse. 

I knew a college professor who but recently 
completed a long life of work. In his youth he 

63 



THE PROFESSOR 



fought through the Civil War, and then turned 
his energies into the no less strenuous battle 
for American scholarship. To be near him was 
to be charged with electricity, so that the stu- 
dents who came under his influence gained a 
new consciousness of the value of wide and 
accurate knowledge. And even the hopeless 
Philistines, whose ideals were those of the mar- 
ket-place, learned to speak with respect at 
least of the shining ones of the intellectual life, 
as the awed barbarians learned to reverence 
the beautiful gods of Greece. When he found 
that his teaching ceased to vary with the vary- 
ing needs of his class, he left the class-room, 
and untiringly began to pour out from the 
storehouse of his mind the accumulations of his 
long career, vigorous, interested, effective as 
when he began. If the academic profession can 
attract and hold and give opportunity to such 
men as the late Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury, 
it need not ask for condolence; rather the pro- 
fessor may say like Hotspur in "Henry IV.": 

"Nay, task me to my word; approve me, 
lord." 

But the professor is human. If America 
regards him as ornamental, he may turn lazy 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

on her hands and snuggle down into a hfe which, 
with all its limitations, is for men of taste and 
culture the most delightful in the world. If 
America dampens his enthusiasm, if he is asked 
to be merely a cultivated and ineffective gentle- 
man, it is the community and not the professor 
who will suffer most from such a policy; it 
is the community who will pay most heavily 
for the mistake. 



THE LUXURY OF BEING 
EDUCATED 

1 TRAVELED for a long day last year across 
the Kansas prairies with a very typical 
group of graduates from American colleges. 
They were from the East, the Middle West, 
and the Far West, brought together merely 
by the exigency of the moment, like a Freshman 
class in college. The journey was quiet; we 
sat in the club-car at our ease, and conversa- 
tion was general. I was struck by the narrow 
range of this conversation. Whether it flowed 
freely among a group at the observation end 
of the car, or became more intimate when chairs 
were drawn together by the buffet, a few topics 
— ^business conditions, real estate, anecdotes, 
and reminiscences — seemed to bound it. In- 
terest did not go further. The men themselves 
were far from uninteresting. From the Oregon 
apple-grower to the New York broker, every 

71 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

one was a factor somehow or somewhere in 
American Hfe. They were not uninteresting; 
but they were uninterested, except in their 
narrow ranges. The broker's interest in apple 
culture went no further than its financial 
aspects; the apple-grower's interest in Wall 
Street was romantic merely; both yawned 
when I talked of the Russian story I was reading, 
or tried to follow through the window the route 
of the Santa Fe trail. There was nothing 
novel in this experience; but it was illuminating. 
It seemed to me that these men had failed to 
get their money's worth of education. 

It is very curious that so few care, or dare, 
to get their money's worth from the American 
college. The poor man gets the best returns. 
He must ask the college first of all to make his 
boy self-supporting — more efficient, if possible, 
than his father; and he gets, as a rule, what he 
pays for. But the poor man is not the typical 
college parent. The typical parent of our 
undergraduates has stored up more or less 
capital; he has a position waiting for his son; 
his boy will be able to live comfortably, no 
matter what may be the efficiency of his mind. 
The ability to support himself, the power to 

72 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

make money, is certainly not the most important 
quality for this boy to possess. Very com- 
monly, especially in the endowed institutions 
of the East, money-making in his family has 
reached the saturation point. It is unnecessary, 
it may be inadvisable, or even wrong, for him 
to enter gainful pursuits. What the son of 
parents in comfortable circumstances requires 
is not so much a narrow training in the support 
of life as a broader one in how to utilize living. 
His interests, quite as much as his mental 
powers, need stimulus, development, and dis- 
cipline. 

I know that in stating the situation so flatly 
I run head on into an American tradition — 
or prejudice. The American democracy — even 
when in no other way democratic — ^believes 
that the American boy, though millions may 
hang over his head, must work for his living, 
must make money. With a righteous fear 
lest his moral fiber degenerate in useless studies, 
the well-to-do father grudgingly allows his son 
to enter college, reminds him constantly that 
the nonsense will be knocked out of him as 
soon as he graduates, and hurries him into 
business as quickly as possible, breathing relief 

73 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

when he is safe in an atmosphere where labor 
is measured by returns in cash. If there were 
danger of starvation ahead he could not be 
more anxious to fix his son's mind on the duty 
of earning ten dollars a week. I do not won- 
der at the fathers — even in the instances to 
which I limit myself, the well-to-do parents 
of intellectually able sons. They are apply- 
ing the American tradition as it was applied 
to them. But what is the effect on the boys.^^ 
Sometimes it is good; often it is unfortunate; 
occasionally it is disastrous. A Junior comes 
into my office for a talk. He is clear-eyed and 
intelligent, but conventional from his clothes 
to his conversation. His father controls an 
enormous business, and he is to begin at the 
bottom of the corporation as soon as he grad- 
uates. I gasp at the figures of output and 
return that he casually mentions. I wonder 
just how he will regard the responsibility which 
the course of events will certainly bring. The 
prospect does not worry him in the least. H^ 
has inherited shrewdness and self-confidence. 
He'll "do as dad did." But of interest in the 
problems and the possibilities involved in this 
vast ownership I discover not a particle, and 

74 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

little more in what his means will enable him 
to do with his life. A fast motor, a country 
club, a good boat, a yearly trip to Paris — 
his ambitions go no further. Among his col- 
lege courses, English composition interests him 
because "dad" says he'll have to write good 
business letters; economics a little because it 
deals with cash; English literature in a barely 
discoverable degree because of the useful 
culture which is supposed to flow from it. All 
the rest of the world of knowledge — ^historical, 
scientific, esthetic — is a dull blank. It does 
not interest him now; it will never interest 
him. 

It is not to be expected that the college can 
ever make an intellectual of such a youth; 
nor should it try to do so. But if we could 
have interested him in ideas; if we could have 
extended and lifted the range of his pleasures; 
widened and deepened his conceptions of 
commerce; given him a "social conscience" — 
we would have accomplished something. It is 
not to the credit of the college that the time- 
spirit in this youth was too strong for its in- 
fluence to combat; but the blame does not 
rest entirely upon the faculty. "Dad" must 

75 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

share the responsibih'ty. He sent the boy to 
us with eyes closed to everything but money- 
making and fun. Perhaps this youngster will 
put all his energies into doubling the family 
fortune; more probably he will discover the 
weakness in the American tradition of work, 
break through it, and enjoy himself according 
to his lights. Of these undesirable alter- 
natives, the second is at least the more human 
and perhaps the more rational. 

But the youth whose plight arouses my 
sympathy and indignation is of a different 
type. His kind is not so abundant in the col- 
leges, but its numbers are increasing yearly. 
He best represents, I think, the new genera- 
tion of educated Americans. 

I knew him first in Freshman year: a 
pleasant boy, well-mannered, with the air of 
one who had lived in a cultivated home. He 
was not an "honor man"; he seemed afraid 
to throw himself into his work. And yet his 
finer accent, his occasional interest in music, 
art, and books, made his classmates a little 
shy of him. He was said to be, possibly, a 
"high-brow," or a "freak." But he was a 
good athlete in a small way, and a "good mixer." 

76 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

As soon as he learned the conventional 
fashion in dressing, and acquired the proper 
slang — which the boys from the big "prep, 
schools" had from the beginning — he got on 
very well. He "made a society," was on the 
track team, wrote for the papers; bade fair to 
have an exemplary college career, and to be- 
come one of the fine fellows who merge in- 
distinguishably into a common type and de- 
part as one man from college. 

However, in Junior year came a reaction. 
I have seen it hundreds of times — a faint dawn 
of intellectual awakening; a sudden interest 
in the world as distinguished from college life. 
The mind grips upon knowledge and moves 
slowly with it, as the wheels move when the 
gears of an automobile engine slide into first 
speed. He was roused to an enthusiasm of 
thinking by a stimulating book. Ideas that 
he did not fancy began to anger him — a sure 
sign of intellectual progress. He began to 
ask intelligent questions. Then he fell into 
a depression over his ignorance. He began to 
criticize the curriculum. Men talked in his 
room till late at night. He bought special 
cigarettes and posed for a little while as an 

77 



COIXEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

esthete. But when he devoted a month of a 
summer vacation to reading up on rehgion, 
and came to a conclusion (so it seemed to me) 
as original as it was wrong, I felt sure that we 
were dealing with a mind. 

This youth came from a family in which 
cultivation and reasonable wealth had been 
hereditary for several generations. There was 
no pressing need for him in the family business, 
no reason why he should not be educated to the 
full; in fact, his parents prided themselves 
on the education that they were giving their 
son. And yet, when Senior year came, and his 
desire for knowledge awakened with the ap- 
proach of the end of the conventional period 
of training, clouds appeared on the domestic 
horizon. I gathered that he was not sufficiently 
anxious to enter business; that he did not 
know what he wished to do; that college seemed 
to be making him unpractical. I was con- 
sulted as a friend, first by him, then by his 
mother. I told his anxious mother that her 
boy needed to learn more, to think more, before 
putting his loiowledge and his desires to the 
test of practice; that, if their means per- 
mitted it, nothing would be so good for him as 

78 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

a little more education. She thanked me — 

and sought a more practical adviser, who 

suggested that the youth be put into the bond 

business so that he should waste no time while 

making up his mind as to his future profession ! 

If he had wished to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or 

an engineer, they would gladly have given 

him the extra years of preparation. But he 

merely wished to think and to know: to study 

more economics, more history; to read widely; 

to carry through some guided work in social 

service, until he could shape his philosophy of 

life, control his mind, and find out what he 

wished to do with his powers. And this, 

coming in no recognized category of youthful 

endeavor, was unpractical, aimless, or leading 

perhaps to idleness and eccentricity. He must 

get to work! 

They chose wisely, according to their lights. 

I think that this youth would have responded 

to the intellectual stimulus which the university 

could have given him. I think that he might 

have been led into study for its own sake, into 

research, perhaps into teaching. Having means, 

he would have been able to follow his bent 

wherever it led him, and taste of the delights 
6 79 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

and the rigors of academic life, without its 
meannesses and its sordid cares. He would 
have cut loose from business for ever, and 
perhaps distinguished himself. But distinc- 
tion of that kind did not interest his family. 
They have made a mediocre business man of 
him; and if that is what they wanted, they 
have moved sagaciously. Nevertheless, I do 
not believe in their lights. 

I am far from urging that all thoughtful, 
intellectually hungry boys should be drawn 
into the academic life. Hundreds of youngsters 
like the one I have described would have carried 
the profits of a fuller education into business 
and the professions. As business men, they 
would have gained in mental power, but most 
of all in a sense of proportion and a better 
understanding* of the aims, the advantages, 
and the possibilities of the life they were 
choosing. As lawyers or doctors or engineers, 
their efficiency surely would not have suffered 
from a broader outlook upon other aspects of 
the world's interests and the world's work, and 
their lives would have gained much. That 
this fuller education, with the keener interest 
in life which comes with it, would have been a 

80 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

luxury for such men, I readily grant. But this 
is the age of luxuries. The same parent who 
balks at an extra year of education lavishes 
automobiles, large incomes, and less desirable 
favors upon his children. Most fathers who 
send their sons to college regard luxuries as a 
right — if not automobiles, riding-horses, good 
pictures, and yachts, at least warm houses, 
electricity, travel, and far more expensive food 
than is needed for sustenance. Granted that 
an education beyond the requirements for self- 
support, but well within the demands of an ac- 
tive, pleasurable, intelligent life, is a luxury, are 
there not many Americans who can afford it? 

I am assured that the best thinkers in the 
educational world are spending their energies 
not in lengthening, but in shortening, the 
period of education; in cutting down waste, 
in increasing efficiency. I can reply that such 
work is invaluable. Let us improve, condense, 
reform, wherever we can, making four-year 
courses into three, if they teach only three 
years' worth, concentrating and improving 
the work in our schools until they turn out 
boys of sixteen as well educated as French or 
German students of the same age. Let us 

81 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

save what time we can, so that the youth who 
can afford no more education than that pro- 
vided by the usual college course may get it 
more speedily or more efficiently. But it is not 
a question here of providing the best educa- 
tion in the least time for those who must hurl 
themselves into the economic struggle. It is 
a question of providing the best education, 
regardless of time, for the boy whose struggle 
will be not so much to support life as to use it 
properly. If such an education is a luxury — 
and when I think of the pre-eminent need of 
the times for more intelligence, I begin to doubt 
my term — then it would be easy to present 
statistics from our colleges which would flatly 
contradict the platitude that in all things 
America is luxurious. 

If the parent with a comfortable living or a 
good position to give his boy would put less 
emphasis on the rigors of the coming financial 
struggle, and more upon the advantages of a 
well-opened mind, the effect upon the college 
would be tremendous. The undergraduate 
would feel it first of all. Upon many, the in- 
fluence, it is true, would be only indirect. 
Out of a college class of, say, three hundred, 

82 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

perhaps fifty are merely well-dressed, agreeable 
young animals, whose minds have already 
attained their maximum of breadth. It is a 
fair question whether they are not already 
spending too much time in education. Per- 
haps one hundred and fifty belong to the great 
average — which is, after all, made up of too 
many varieties to be called an average. Dull 
men, who work, nevertheless, with faithfulness; 
bright men, lazy by nature; busy men, far too 
much concerned now with social or commercial 
success to spend much more energy in thinking — 
all these would feel that the world outside was 
beginning to value culture and the intellect, 
and, without radically changing their hab.its 
or their aims, would nevertheless manage to get 
what they felt to be their share of mental broad- 
ening. But it is of the remaining one hundred 
that I write: the men who are not content to 
take at second hand, or do without, the illumina- 
tion of the last century of science, or the accu- 
mulated knowledge and inspiration of the 
earlier world; the men whose minds are open- 
ing and are worth opening. Many of them 
are eager for active life, and will not wait for 
more education; many of them are poor and 

33 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

cannot wait; but many more would choose 
the luxury of a deeper preparation if anxious 
parents, moved by a short-sighted public 
opinion, did not force them, still immature, 
into the world. They may know the text, 
"Man shall not live by bread alone"; but in 
the face of practical adults asserting the con- 
trary, and urging them to come out and earn 
their living, they are not likely to apply it. 
For it takes a clearer sight, a stronger will, and 
more independence than even the exceptional 
boy is likely to possess, to see that education 
in some instances may be the first and most 
important profession. 

The effect upon the professor of a more gen- 
erous parental attitude toward education would 
be as great as upon the undergraduate, and more 
calculable. The college, as distinguished from 
the technical school, has always proposed, as 
its ideal, to educate for living — and this term 
includes both earning one's living and enjoying 
it. The difficulty now is that the faculty, the 
parent, and the undergraduate each grasp their 
interpretation of this broad purpose and pull 
as hard as they can in different directions. 

The faculty, on the whole, lean too far 

84 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

toward the idealistic side of this education. 
The extremists among them maintain that in 
college a boy should study nothing practical, 
nothing with potentialities of money-making. 
But education is surely broader than they 
think. It is a poor education which in teaching 
a comprehension of living does not help toward 
earning the daily bread. In truth, it is, and 
I suppose it always will be, a fault of our pro- 
fession that we turn away from the utilitarian 
aspects of our subjects, and are more interested 
in their cultural than in their commercial value. 
Our lack of experience in turning thought 
into dollars makes us unduly depreciate what 
might be called the business end of a liberal 
education. 

But where this error exists we have been 
driven into it by the obstinacy of parents, who 
will not see that the power to make money is 
only a by-product of education — ^by well-to-do 
parents especially, who send us youngsters 
who will have to assume vast responsibilities 
and use vast opportunities for service and 
pleasure, saying. Teach my youthful mill- 
ionaire how to make more money! We have 
had to fight an ingrained American prejudice; 

85 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

no wonder that we have become a little prej- 
udiced ourselves in the course of the struggle. 

For all these reasons, the reactive effect of 
even a portion of a class sent to college in 
sympathy with the ideals of the college profess- 
or — which are, after all, those of a true liberal 
education — would be very great. We would 
not turn out geniuses, or make over America; 
but that deathly indifference, sprung of con- 
flicting aims, which hangs like a fog-bank over 
the American college, would lift and lighten. 
The inefficiency which is to be found in teach- 
ing as well as in business, and the inherent 
laziness of the human animal, would prevent a 
too rapid clearing of the atmosphere. We 
would not be blinded by the flash. But I 
think that professor and father and son might 
begin to work together toward a common 
purpose; and that the teacher would teach more 
broadly and more successfully the things which 
knowledge can contribute to life. 

But if education should be numbered among 
the permitted luxuries of American life, the 
greatest effect would be on a department of 
the university that means little now to the 
undergraduate and less than little to the 

86 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

American parent. I mean the graduate school, 
the business of which is to give advanced train- 
ing in the pursuit of knowledge. The well- 
to-do parent is not especially interested in the 
productive activities of the graduate school, 
and I do not see why he should be. He thinks 
of it, if he thinks of it at all, as a highly special- 
ized laboratory for turning out unreadable 
treatises on the sources of unreadable plays; 
or accounts of ridiculously named chemical 
compounds; or pamphlets on Sanscrit inflec- 
tions; or philosophical theories whose very 
titles he does not understand. It is absurd 
to maintain that he should be vitally interested 
because these represent the outposts of knowl- 
edge. No one blames him for a lack of in- 
terest in the valves of a steam-turbine, in how 
to modify milk for a ten months' baby, in the 
manufacture of breakfast foods. These things 
also are important. He cannot afford to despise 
them because they lie beyond his metier; but 
enthusiasm is not demanded of him. 

In another phase of the graduate school, 
however, he might well be more interested. 
I mean in the opportunities it offers, or could 
offer, to his boy. We have heard much of 

87 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

what the graduate schools can do for the 
country. I am more concerned just now with 
what they might do for the undergraduate 
who is to be allowed the luxury of a little more 
education. 

My own experience was typical only in so 
far as my condition resembled that of hundreds 
of boys who come to Senior year in college 
with a distressing vagueness of aims, a feeling 
of incapacity, and one certainty — that they 
are not yet educated, that they are not yet 
ready to enter the world. As it happened, I 
was allowed to choose the path of the graduate 
school. 

I entered uncertain, doubtful of what in- 
terested me, guiltily conscious that I ought 
to be earning ten dollars a week in an office or a 
mill. I found myself in a new atmosphere. 
We were starting over again; we were boasting 
of our ignorance; we were clamoring for 
knowledge; yearning for opportunities to study 
in a field which grew wider and wider under our 
touch. Far from separating ourselves from 
life, we seemed to grow for the first time acutely 
conscious of it. Reality, instead of being a 
simple affair of making money, marrying, and 

88 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

dying, began to grow vast, complex, and infi- 
nitely interesting. It was with difficulty that 
we held ourselves to the little segment which 
was assigned to us for study. Our thoughts 
leaped ahead — though still vaguely — to the 
practical, concrete work we must do, and we 
were distressed at the opportunities for knowl- 
edge that must be left behind us. Ennui be- 
came unthinkable; idleness a crime. Yet we 
were boys still, and intensely human boys. 
We sat late with beer and pipes, and talked 
nonsense far more effectively than in under- 
graduate days; we took up athletics, which in 
college we had left to the teams; we were 
even merrier because our mirth came as a 
reaction from hard work. When we compared 
experiences with the intellectually sympathetic 
among our classmates who had gone out into 
the world, we found that they, too, had felt 
the spring and the stimulus of directed, piA*- 
poseful endeavor. But except where they 
had already discovered a career, their enthu- 
siasm was less than ours, their energies not so 
active; they did not seem to be on such good 
terms with life. 

Of course, in a way, we were specialists, and 

89 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

this seems to remove my personal experience 
from the argument I am advancing for the 
luxury of a full education. In reality, I think, 
it does not. For we were specialists only by 
compulsion, because, since most of us were 
preparing for teaching or scholarship, we knew 
that we must confine most of our labors to one 
field. And I think that it was, and is, one 
of the defects of the graduate school that it 
drives too quickly into the more highly spe- 
cialized branches of knowledge; that it puts 
all the emphasis upon preparation for scholarly 
production, just as the world outside puts 
all the emphasis upon money-making. 

In fact, the graduate school looked with a 
hardly concealed contempt upon the candidates 
for a simple M.A. degree who would not go 
to the bitter end of any one line of endeavor, 
who were seeking merely a further preparation 
for life. And that was its weakness. There it 
shared — though the accusation would have 
angered its professors — the American prejudice 
against the luxury of a general education. In 
all that seething intellectual life, with its 
burning interests and increasing powers, many 

of them saw no health except in the student 

90 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

dedicated to research. Those who left us by 
the way — for the law, for business, for diplo- 
macy, or for literature — they regarded as strayed 
sheep. 

No one who knows the results would be so 
blind as to attack the value of that specializa- 
tion in research which has already placed our 
graduate schools beside those of Germany and 
France. But why have we failed to realize 
that in the means they offer for fulfilling a 
general education they can satisfy a real need 
of contemporary America? The life we tasted 
there would be better for many a thoughtful, 
hesitating Senior I have known since than a 
half-hearted plunge into a world which did 
not yet interest him; a year or so later it would 
have sent him, eager and enthusiastic, into 
an activity which his broadening mind could 
have chosen for itself. 

It is easy to abuse America and the American 
parent for parsimony in education, but it is 
not very satisfactory. To begin with, it is 
futile to abuse a tendency, and the American 
attitude toward liberal education is a tendency 
— and an inherited tendency, which makes it 
all the more diflScult to escape. The American 

91 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

parent has, as a rule, but recently attained 
economic independence and ended his up-hill 
climb. His sons can start on the level; they 
will not have to climb as he climbed. But 
climbing is what he best understands; and he 
must be liberal-minded and a little prophetic 
in his vision if he does not send his boys to 
college to prepare for the needs, not of their 
generation, but his own. 

It is easy to abuse the undergraduate for 
not striving harder for the kind of education 
that will make him most happy and most 
useful. But to what advantage.? The patient 
is not to blame when the wrong medicine, or 
too little medicine, is prescribed for him! And 
furthermore, that minority of our undergrad- 
uates who really need more education are ask- 
ing for it, are struggling for it, though often 
in a blind and half -conscious fashion. Every 
college teacher not case-hardened in intellectual 
superiority knows and is rejoiced by this fact. 

In truth, the college teacher must take his 
share of responsibility for the niggardliness of 
American education. I suppose that we realize 
the essential importance in contemporary life 
of the intelligence which comes from a full edu- 

92 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

cation, but I confess that I think we do not 
always act upon our realization. I find myself 
constantly resisting the temptation to say: 
"This, gentlemen, will not interest you: it 
leads to an appreciation of life; it' shows how 
to rise to the possibilities of living; but it will 
never make a cent for you, and it is difficult. 
You must study it; but you won't be inter- 
ested." I hate this hierophantic, better-than- 
thou attitude in myself or any other teacher. 
What right have we to assume that the higher 
realms of the intellect are reserved for the 
scholar and the theorist .^^ What right to smile 
superciliously at all interest in knowledge 
that does not lead directly toward scholarly 
production.^ What is gained by asserting that 
study must be bleak and austere; that learning 
must be unworldly and exclusive? The col- 
leges also have been indisposed to allow the 
competent — who do not wish to become spe- 
cialists — the luxury of a full education. 

Conclusions will quickly be reached by those 
who take the trouble to look about them. 
We are not so rooted in our prejudice against 
work that is unmeasurable by cash as to have 
produced no examples of those who are profiting 

93 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

themselves or the country by the luxurious 
excess of their education. The young mill- 
ionaire who is using his wealth efficiently, 
enthusiastically, wisely for social service and 
social knowledge, is no longer so rare as to be 
unfamiliar, though he is still a curiosity. He 
is drawing dividends for himself and others 
from a deeper comprehension of the needs of 
society than experience without education 
could have given him. And many a man not a 
millionaire, though master of his income, is 
using his business or his profession for broad 
and interesting services to the community, 
made possible by the knowledge and the in- 
terests with which education has endowed 
him. Less valuable, perhaps, and yet in- 
valuable in a genuine civilization, is another 
and more familier type: the business man or 
lawyer who has learned how to live outside 
his office; whose pleasures are not limited to 
the physical and the sensual; who has a hinter- 
land, a background, as H. G. Wells puts it; 
who is a cultivated, sympathetic, intelligent, 
broad-minded man first, and a good business 
man or lawyer afterward. This, too, is a 
product of education — an almost inevitable 

94 



THE LUXURY OF BEING EDUCATED 

result of a full and true education, when the 
mind is capable of receiving and profiting by 
the riches of knowledge and the stimulus of 
ideas. 

Observe, on the other hand, the sons of 
parents in comfortable circumstances, the boys 
who were guaranteed a fair start in life whenever 
and however they entered upon practical work, 
and who sought only the utilitarian in college. 
Have they gained by their loss of culture and 
a broad education? Are they more useful to 
the community, more interesting to themselves; 
are they happier? Those who left us when 
their interests were just awakening — have they 
gained by the year or so of time they have 
saved? 

Consider those familiar figures in American 
life: the bored youth selling bonds "to keep 
doing something"; the half-hearted successor 
to a big business who lets his subordinates 
carry most of the work; the wealthy youngster 
who conducts a gambling business on the stock- 
exchange because he must have some excite- 
ment; the rich idler too intelligent to find the 
usual means of time-killing efficacious; the 

heir to a million making more money doggedly 
7 95 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

because he doesn't know what else to do. 
Some of these misfittings, no doubt, arise from 
difficulties of temperament, or defects in char- 
acter; but many of them are due simply and 
solely to insufficient education. These men 
have not been raised intellectually to the level 
of their opportunities. Their interests are still 
dormant. Nothing very serious is the matter 
with them; they get along well enough accord- 
ing to common opinion. More education, 
whether in college or in graduate school, was 
not a necessity; it was a luxury; but it was a 
luxury they could well have afforded. 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE 
EDUCATION 

SINCE the West has been tamed, Alaska 
been made into a political question merely, 
detectives become lecturers or magazine- writers, 
and bandits proved to be only mental degen- 
erates, romance, or at least the romantic life, 
has become a scarce article in America. This 
accounts, probably, for the revival of melo- 
drama and the success of the photoplay. The 
less chance for a living romance, the keener 
our appetite for an artificial variety. And this 
leads me to wonder why so little advantage 
has been taken upon the stage and in books 
of the most romantic experience still available 
in everyday America — I mean, "college life.'' 

I asked this question once of a novelist, 
suggesting the care-free, vigorous experiences 
of happy college living as a subject for a book 
that would crystallize the vivid sensations 

97 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

of the most intense period of youth. He 
replied that life in college was too immature, 
too superficial, too lacking in significance for 
good story -telling; — that it could not be made 
precise without taking too seriously what were, 
after all, gambols in pasture of colts not yet 
familiar with the road. Perhaps he was right. 
Certainly the excessive rarity of books or plays 
that present "college life" without caricature 
or over - emphasis goes to prove his point. 
Nevertheless, even though its romance be 
ephemeral, mere dawn shades of pink that 
fade in the light, romance it is of the right rose 
quality — all the romance that many an Amer- 
ican will ever possess. 

It is a little sad that the stern idealist feels 
it his duty to train his heavy guns upon an 
experience so rich in charm and so great in its 
rewards. If he is a Jeremy Collier, execrating 
youth because it is youthful, demanding re- 
sponsibility where irresponsibility still has some 
value and much delight, I sympathize with him 
as little as with the respectable resident of a 
college town who grumbles "ruffian" when- 
ever some one shouts "Fire!" from the dor- 
mitories in the calm of an April night. If he 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

complains that "college life," romance and all, 

has set itself in dangerous opposition to the 

more serious business of a college, I am forced 

to assent. But I assent reluctantly, since 

this opposition seems to me one of the most 

depressing and unfortunate circumstances in 

the history of the American college. "College 

life" and college education ought to get along 

well together. They should complement^ not 

contradict, each other; for their services, when 

rightly understood, are curiously alike. 

The professor (who is supposed to represent 

the serious side of college education) and the 

undergraduate mix well enough — outside of 

the class-room. In fact, when thrown together 

in circumstances entirely free from restraint — 

in a home, or a club, or on a tramp across the 

hills — ^they have an attraction for each other 

much stronger than that which draws together 

the outer world of older and younger men. 

As an instance, my steps in the later afternoon 

lead me past two clubs, one for older men only, 

one where graduate and undergraduate may 

meet and mix. With noteworthy frequency I 

find myself turning in at the club of mingled 

ages. Is it because I like to talk in the presence 

99 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

of those who, on account of their accustomed 
deference to professorial authority, will give 
my words weight? I have charged myself with 
that human weakness, and answered "not 
guilty." Mortal men are subject to such 
temptations; but in this case there is a better 
reason. I like to hear them talk. 

"For we were nursed upon the self -same 
hill." The life they live was my life, and is 
still a part of it. I see its false emphasis, its 
misguided energies, but let any one attack it 
and I rally to its defense. Nor is this col- 
legiate loyalty unreciprocated by the under- 
graduate. 

And this is as it should be, for the vivid 
experiences and fresh interests of "college 
life" are part of the educative process in which 
the professor of the liberal arts is engaged. 
The boy who lives a keen, full life in college — 
and where can you live more intensely and more 
en joy ably? — ^not only has a good time out of 
it all; he learns to know what is worth while 
in pleasures and occupations. He learns the 
art of choice — choice of pleasures, choice of 
occupations, choice of friends, choice of the 
experiences that seem to him valuable. And 

100 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

still more important, his experiences give him 
an open mind toward other men's tastes and 
pursuits. 

So much for life in college. But the end 
of liberal education differs from this only 
in degree, not in kind. Liberal education 
gives a knowledge of the principles by which 
men act, have acted in the past, and will act 
in the future. The man who acquires it learns 
to know what is worth while — ^but from a far 
broader experience than his own personal as- 
sociations can give him. He also learns the 
art of choice — though here the choices are in 
knowledge and belief rather than in the more 
domestic relations of life. Most of all, he 
broadens and deepens his mind until it is 
"liberalized," until it is made free of the world 
that man's intellect has conquered for us. 

And thus college education in its high meas- 
ure and college life in its minor fashion both 
drive at the same general results. Both aim 
at a sense of proportion in living; both aim 
at a useful, active knowledge of true values 
in life. But unfortunately for our peace of 
mind, and unfortunately for the prestige of the 

American degree, college education has not 

lox 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

been as successful in this country as college 
life. It is this which has led to the conflict 
of interests which all recognize. It is this 
which has led to the teacher's depreciation 
of college life, and the undergraduate's neglect 
of college education, both of which I deplore. 
We will never find the remedy by turning 
sour faces on the intense and romantic life of 
the campus, as if our ideal were a day-school 
where athletics consisted of dumbbell exercises 
and the pupils should know one another not 
half so well as their books. College life has 
been too genuinely successful for such silly 
contempt. The proof is that the most notice- 
able characteristic of the college graduate to- 
day is neither culture nor efficiency nor in- 
tellectual grasp — all of which in varying meas- 
ures he may possess — ^but an easy attitude 
toward the world of men. He may take his 
B.A. with little knowledge and less mental 
discipline to his credit; but he cannot get 
through four years of an American college 
without learning to adjust himself gracefully 
to all manner of men and many varieties of 
ideas. If he has not been given vision, at 
least he has not lived perforce under a rain of 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

ideas and in a nest of different opinions with- 
out learning to distrust the dogmatic. If he 
has not been taught to think for himself, at 
least he has not dwelt in terms of unusual 
intimacy with companions of diverse interests, 
and personalities still more diverse, without 
learning to be courteous to a new point of view 
when he meets one, without learning a little of 
how it best profits a man to conduct his life 
and direct his thoughts. I cannot always 
tell a college man by what he knows, or by 
what he does; but I can well-nigh invariably 
distinguish him if, in a miscellaneous gathering, 
I can see how he listens, or hear him talk. 
And these virtues he owes not entirely, but in 
large measure, to the informal education that 
comes from merely living in college. 

But the soil of college life is light. An easy 
manner, a ready tolerance, a flexible mind, are 
greatly to be desired; they do not, however, 
guarantee the sense for values and the power 
to handle life that only education in a stricter 
sense can give. Playing on the teams, compet- 
ing for social honors, living in happy haphazard 
in dormitories, acquiring knowledge in droves, 
and sharing intensely in the vivid, strenuous 

103 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

activity that surges in and out of an American 
college — all this is admirable preparation for 
learning what is worth while in life. But 
ingredients stiffer than sociability and com- 
petitive endeavor must be present if we are to 
grow a knowledge of how to live that will 
weather the storms of practical life and resist 
the chill of middle age. The soil must be richer. 
And this is why the success of college life 
has been, on the whole, so unsatisfactory. We 
have been graduating "good mixers" by the 
hundred; but somehow we have failed to turn 
their breadth of mind into breadth of thinking. 
They are liberal enough in their opinion; but 
they lack liberality of spirit. They are tolerant 
enough of their fellows; but they lack the 
knowledge that must accompany tolerance in 
life. It becomes increasingly clear that the 
American college graduate needs more educa- 
tion in the good old narrow sense of the word, 
more training in thinking, more thought. He 
needs an honest knowledge of the great prin- 
ciples that underlie human thought and action, 
the principles that have been crystallized in 
the modern humanities — history, literature, 
social and natural science, art, and the rest. 

104 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

It is through these abstracts and ehxirs that he 
must deepen his comprehension of why and how 
things happen in Hfe. Otherwise, no matter 
how active and how varied his extra-curriculum 
Hfe, he must intrust his course (as many have 
to do) to a harsh pilot — experience — find out as 
he goes, learn fully at the end of life, perhaps, 
but less at the beginning — in a word, forego 
that college education which is less romantic 
but more essential than college life. 

And it is this very college education, let us 
confess it frankly, that has been less successful 
than college life. It has not so strongly 
stamped our graduates. It has not entered 
into their imagination so pervasively; nor, 
except in the realm of practical efficiency, has 
it so deeply influenced their after life. I do 
not mean that our play in college has had a 
greater absolute effect upon this generation 
than our work. I mean that, with due regard 
for relative importances, play has accomplished 
the most. No need to reiterate the old reasons : 
that no man can place his heart and soul in 
the keeping of the football team, and at the 
same time learn economics; nor center his 
entire ambition on "making a fraternity" and 

105 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

still get educated. If college life runs thus to 
excess it is partly because the charms of divine 
philosophy and other college subjects are not 
strong enough to hold it back. Instead of 
damning college life, its romance and its realism 
together, let us search out other, deeper reasons 
for the unsatisfactory achievements of liberal 
education. 

Two at least I see with clarity. The first 
is that the average undergraduate does not 
practically and effectively believe in breadth 
of thinking. He does not believe in it with the 
only kind of faith that is worth anything, the 
faith that works miracles — and illustrates his 
skepticism daily by refusing to take educa- 
tion with half the seriousness he expends upon 
the hours between afternoon lectures and dinner- 
time. I have discussed elsewhere this lack of 
faith — a resistance in the class-room that every 
professor feels, a resistance as strong, though 
almost as hidden, as that of a coil of wire to 
the current that runs through it. And it is 
scarcely necessary to add that the successful 
rivalry of college life is also a factor and a large 
one. But the second reason I have not dis- 
cussed, partly because it is highly personal, 

loa 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

partly because if the first were remedied it 
would no longer exist. I mean the deadly 
effect of this American indifference to educa- 
tion upon the college professor himself. 

I do not know whether it is scientific, but 
at least it is instructive to estimate the pro- 
fessor's expenditure of energy in an average 
recitation — lectures are less laborious because, 
requiring less of a class, they meet with less 
resistance — in, say, foot-pounds. Thirty foot- 
pounds, let us suppose, go into the arduous 
but stimulating process of preparation. Thirty 
are consumed in the pleasant and invigorating 
operation of really teaching an aroused and 
interested class. Well, then, a good forty are 
exhausted, burned up, wasted, in merely over- 
coming resistance to knowing — ^in fighting in- 
difference, and sometimes sullen dislike. I 
am not trying to escape from the teacher's 
burden. The normal student mind dislikes 
hard work just as the normal body dislikes 
it. There will always be inertia to overcome; 
always the resistance of matter against which 
mind must struggle. But here is a needless 
expenditure; here is unrecompensed loss. If 

college education has not lived up to the 

107 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

greatness of its opportunity, this is one explana- 
tion. College education, after all, is the college 
professor. And he is wearied before he can 
begin his task. 

Worse lies behind. He is not only wearied; 
sometimes he is rendered ineflficient; some- 
times he is de-educated in those very qualities 
that it is his business to teach — breadth of 
knowledge, breadth of sympathy, wisdom in 
knowing and choosing the means of life. The 
sluggishness of college education is sometimes 
said to be due to the lamentable faqt that, in 
plain American, the professor is not always 
"up to his job." If this is true, why then 
(to keep to plain American) one reason is that 
he exhausts himself in the attempt to "get it 
over," and becomes less broad than his pro- 
fession, less stimulating than the subjects he 
should teach. He may lose his sense of propor- 
tion, and, with far greater opportunities, become 
less valuable to the cause of liberal education 
than the trivialities of college life. 

I remember once being first bored, then 
amused, then fascinated by a traveling-man 
who, through a long journey over the Penn- 
sylvania hills, interpreted the country about 

108 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

us in terms of vacuum cleaners. The streams 
were potential sources of current for his ma- 
chines; the villages he knew by the names of 
the purchasers; in the towns he exulted over 
virgin stores of still unsucked dirt. So it is 
occasionally with some professors of the modern 
humanities. They have worked so hard to 
sell their commodities that they have come to 
put an undue emphasis upon their value. They 
see the world in terms of their own subjects, 
and otherwise are blind. 

Many such men exist, and some help to make 
the world more humorous. I know a biologist 
who when he dines out has an uncomfortable 
habit of studying the effect of the food values 
consumed upon his neighbors. There are stories 
afloat in most college towns of the perils through 
which the children of psychologists must pass 
before they reach the age when they can protect 
themselves against experimentation. Carried 
to an extreme, this makes the so-called "aca- 
demic manner" that makes men mad. This 
leads to an insistence upon the superior value 
of sociology or literature or history in com- 
parison with all the rest of knowledge or expe- 
rience. One may forgive, perhaps, the member 

109 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

of a faculty who neglects the "big game" of 
his college for matters he considers more im- 
portant. One does not forgive the man who 
makes it plain to his classes that without an 
expert knowledge of physics or economics 
or history life on this contemptible planet is 
entirely without justification. Such a teacher 
has cut his efficiency in half, because he has 
lost his sense of proportion. He has lost it, 
like the Israelites, in struggling desperately 
and devotedly against the stubborn resistance 
of the Philistines. But no matter how noble 
the cause, it is gone. 

I am reluctant to be called pessimistic, and so 
I hasten to add that instances of this kind are 
not nearly so common in American universities 
as critics believe. The undergraduate whose 
interests are confined to football, musical 
comedy, and the success of his fraternity is 
easily persuaded that the man who tries to 
teach him government or geology takes his 
subject too seriously. Nevertheless, here is 
a very real reason why college education does 
not always "get over" in college. The teacher 
who has to pound away too hard may forget 
what he is pounding on, and almost why. He 

110 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

is like the woodpecker that pecked on a rubber 
sponge until its head came off. From that 
portion of his labors that is ineffectual he suf- 
fers, as all must, an undue measure of weariness 
and pain. Often he is tempted, and no won- 
der, to turn his best energies in more profitable 
directions, and give his second-best to his in- 
different classes. In any case — whether weary 
or humorless, discouraged or evasive — he may 
become a drag upon college education. The 
effort required to interest Americans in getting 
educated has been costly to him, and costly to 
them also. Nor can we look for relief to those 
happy spirits who are not troubled by resistance; 
who sail on and over the recalcitrant mind while 
they teach, spreading their sails to the breeze 
of their own eloquence, content with indifference 
if it is amiable, and uncritical of interest so 
long as it is awake. They will never lead us 
into blue water, for their sense of the worth- 
while is of too light a draught. They belong 
to college life rather than to college educa- 
tion. 

The whole question of success or failure in 
American education is just now tremendously 
pertinent. Even being an American is a fear- 

8 111 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

ful responsibility. As I read the morning 
paper in a meditative mood, I feel as may 
have felt the inhabitants of some walled town 
in sixth-century France, when the old world 
to the southward flared into confused warfare 
and fell away in ruin. Like them, we must 
stand for a while on our own feet; like them, 
I suppose (for history does not record their 
psychology), we search our hearts to see what 
civilization is in us. The experience is sobering. 
One realizes how ill-digested is our European 
culture; how little it has worked as yet into 
the blood and sinew of a distinctive Amer- 
icanism. One realizes still more how many 
alien illiterates there are who have scarcely 
begun the assimilative process — how many 
alien literates who may refuse the native educa- 
tion we offer to them. American culture will 
have to be modified; that is clear. And yet 
it must be kept culture, and must be kept 
American, if America is to remain (and become) 
American. I do not suppose that any of us 
yet realizes the magnitude of the task, nor the 
responsibility it will place upon our colleges. 
We shall need faith. We shall need to work 
with, not against, the professor. 

112 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

It is hard to write of education without 
letting the pen fly into generalities. The term 
itself is so broad, so meaningful, that it is 
dij95cult to keep to the concrete. Emerson 
states as well as any one the difficult task that 
lies before those who would teach the modern 
humanities, but even Emerson escapes into 
somewhat nebulous verities: 

Can rules or tutors educate 
The semi-god whom we await? 
He must be musical. 
Tremulous, impressional. 
Alive to gentle influence 
Of landscape and of sky. 
And tender to the spirit-touch 
Of man's or maiden's eye: 
But to his native center fast. 
Shall into Future fuse the Past, 
And the world's flowing fates in his own mold 
recast. 

And yet college education is really just as con- 
crete as college life. For it amounts to little 
unless it makes a man or woman speak more 
kindly, act more wisely, think more truly. 
And it is good for little until it has crystallized 
and become a part of life itself. 

It is this that explains and sums up the nature 

113 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

of the problem that I have been discussing in 
this essay, and of many other college problems 
upon which I have touched in earlier pages. 
Education, like Bergson's vital force, may be 
regarded as always beating upon the stubborn 
matter of the brain, trying to transfuse it, 
trying to become real, to become tangible, to 
become life. Like Falstaff's "honor," educa- 
tion is a word; it is air. It has no real ex- 
istence except in the educated man. And he 
is a hard- won triumph over intractable matter 
— ^flesh, blood, and bone made against their 
own sodden nature to act by thought and 
according to intelligent will. 

Your teacher is merely an instrument. 
Abuse him, and he will be a bad one; weary 
him, and he will be ineffective; destroy his 
sense of proportion, and his usefulness will 
decrease. 

Your college graduate or parent is a directing 
force, to be used on one side or another of this 
great struggle, a struggle renewed whenever 
a child comes to the age of reason, or a race 
moves upward into the light of civilization. 
To many observers it seems that the "average 
American," of whom, as is right in a democracy, 

114 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

we are all afraid, has taken the part of bone 
and blood and flesh. At most he has tolerated 
higher education. Sometimes he has sneered 
at it, and sent his children to college wrapped 
in the triple brass of indifference, ready to 
perform lip-service only. 

Your undergraduate represents matter — 
tractable or intractable — in whom we try to 
grow that sense of values which is the fine 
flower of liberal education. He begins — or at 
least his finer spirits begin — to grow weary of 
being intractable. He begins to strike out at 
the stupid conventions of the American college, 
which require activity and condemn thought. 
He begins to criticize the curriculum and liis 
own attitude toward it; he begins to look out 
upon America; is superciliously contemptuous 
of our magazines, amused by our best-sellers, 
repelled by the narrow intensity of our busi- 
ness life. He even begins to be interested in 
American politics. In a word, the undergraduate 
is at last getting educated. 

It will be hard for the average American to 
throw his influence upon the side of spirit — 
and the professor — in this struggle with matter. 
It will be hard for him to accept the new era; 

115 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

for the success of college education will reveal 
itself first in a respect for many things — 
science, art, literature, music, political and 
economic theory — for which he has had scant 
reverence. The increased eflSciency in busi- 
ness, in the professions, and in money-making 
generally that is bound to follow, will show 
itself much more slowly; as will the still greater 
improvement in the art of living that should 
be the perfect consummation of a successful 
training in the modern humanities. But you 
cannot down a sense of due proportion once it 
begins to ripen. And fortunately, the Amer- 
icans who send their children to college are 
average only when taken in the mass. In- 
dividually, most of them will be on our side 
when they understand the importance of what 
we are trying to "get over" with such labor 
and weariness, against such an undue and un- 
wise resistance from minds whose profit we 
seek. 

There is nothing wrong with the idea of the 
American college, except growing-pains. It 
has not failed. It has but recently gone to 
trial; and on some counts it already stands 
acquitted. Our college has given us a new 



COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION 

kind of American, more versatile, more gre- 
garious, more urbane, more moral in the pur- 
suit of affairs, and more accessible to ideas than 
all but the pick of the generation before the 
Civil War. That it has not yet guaranteed real 
education, or insured true breadth of thought, 
is due not to the romance of college life, but to 
the lack of faith in college education. And 
that the professor should have to fight for 
things lovely and of good report until his arms 
are weakened and his vision dimmed reveals 
a lack in the average American of precisely 
that sense of proportion which it is the function 
of the college to teach. His sense of humor 
has failed him for once. It needs to be lib- 
eralized; it needs to be educated. 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

CERTAIN British essayists of the perverse 
school have discovered a new way of dis- 
lodging from the minds of their readers a prej- 
udice against new ideas. They blast it out 
with a paradox. The method is surprisingly 
simple. You begin by asserting, for example, 
that dogs are more moral than men. The 
statement catches the attention of the sleepiest 
reader, arouses his antagonisms, and forces 
him to mobilize his powers of resistance. That 
is, it wakes him up — which was all the wily 
writer desired. To withdraw from an unten- 
able paradox — as, for instance, to show that 
dogs are moral according to their lights, and 
men immoral by theirs — is as easy as to make 
one. The paradox is the bell on the engine of 
logic; it is the horn on the automobile of 
thought. 

118 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

Some horn, some bell, is necessary in order 
to get a hearing amid the clamor of criticism, 
argument, and diatribe that hangs like the roar 
of a city over our educ^ational councils. Greek 
has been carried out from the noisy assemblage 
in the agonies of dissolution; Latin has been 
banged into decrepitude; mathematics is totter- 
ing; grammar and spelling are prostrate, with 
new and uncouth shapes — blacksmithing, mil- 
linery, sex hygiene stepping over them into 
the curriculum. To one who wishes to say a 
quiet word in this confusion a paradox may be 
pardoned. Is it paradoxical to assert that the 
American attitude toward education is more 
faulty than the curriculum,'* 
^ There are two kinds of education: one cer- 
tain, the other uncertain; one direct in its 
application and obvious in its results, the other 
indirect in its methods, with effects that must 
be deduced from the life of the recipient. One 
education teaches how to work in order to 
live; the other how to live in order, among 
other things, to work. The first we have re- 
named "vocational training," given its ancient 
precepts a fresh coat of paint, and set it up as 
an enviable novelty; the other, for want of some 
119 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

more specific title, we still call a "liberal educa- 
tion." 

These two kinds of education are comple- 
mentary and equally important. Both have 
been always necessary to civilization. Both 
always will be necessary; and their respective 
services are defined not by theory, but 
by the needs of men and the times. Yet 
prejudice, obstinacy, and blindness have set 
their advocates by the ears and led to scho- 
lastic wars that differ from the fierce conflicts 
of the medieval universities only in being more 
wordy and less picturesque. I have heard the 
rights and wrongs of a liberal education bitterly 
discussed in Parisian cafes and upon New 
England mountain-tops. At the extremity of 
a California canon, beneath rock walls as high 
and more remote than Yosemite's, on a trail 
that hung between waterfall and precipice, I 
have been stopped by a high-school principal 
until I should tell him what I thought of 
vocationalism in the schools. No modern 
teacher or student or parent can much longer 
escape the necessity of taking a stand in this 
controversy and — what is far better — thinking 
it out. 

X20 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

There is nothing new in vocational education, 
nor can it always be distinguished from the 
other variety. A false emphasis leads us to 
think of it in terms of those applied sciences 
— electrical engineering, chemistry, hygiene — 
that are new in principle, or those crafts — 
dressmaking, bookkeeping, stenography — that 
are new in the curriculum. But Latin, as has 
often been said, was vocational in the Middle 
Ages and the Renaissance, when a knowledge 
of that tongue was a prerequisite for all the 
professions except arms. Mathematics is both 
vocational and liberal. Even such abstract 
subjects as astronomy may become vocational, 
as fiction reminds us, when the hero, ship- 
wrecked upon an island, saves his life from 
cannibals by predicting an eclipse. All training 
directly applicable to the problem of sub- 
sistence is vocational, although its nature may 
vary with the race, the age, and the environ- 
ment involved. 

If man could live by bread alone we might 
be content with vocational education. By that 
very intellectual unrest that makes for evolu- 
tion he cannot. Having eaten, he must learn 

to use the life he has preserved. But while 

1^1 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

sustenance is theoretically a very simple prob- 
lem — being only a question of how much you 
can earn and what you can buy with it — the 
use one makes of the vital energy into which 
life transforms is the most complex and dif- 
ficult of all questions. Religion, ethics, educa- 
tion, all bear upon it, intersect and blend so 
that it is almost as difficult to say what teaches 
one to live as to answer the question of how to 
live itself. It is enough to observe that educa- 
tion has a part here which is not vocational, 
and which is enormously important. 

This is the province of liberal education. 
Its services are indirect, because its effects 
must be transmuted into the art of living; 
they are uncertain in the same proportion as 
all life is illusory and never to be confined in 
measures made by man. Nevertheless, al- 
though these services are indefinite in their 
breadth, at least we can specify some of them. 
We know, for example, that the mind must be 
able to grasp abstractions; and so we apply 
mathematics. We know that it must have 
perspective and background if it is to under- 
stand the passing show of brief reality allowed 
it; and so we instil history. We know that it 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

must be able to interpret character, to feel the 
loftiest emotion, to perceive beauty and enjoy 
it; and so we give it literature and the arts. 
Man is to be liberalized. He is to be taught to 
comprehend life. 

It is much more difficult to teach com- 
prehension of life than control over nature. 
Consider, for instance, the necessary imper- 
fections of such an instrument as history, which, 
itself but a crude and inaccurate representa- 
tion of an earlier period, must be interpreted 
and assimilated by the reader before it can be 
applied to a new age where many factors are 
different and some unknown. And compare 
it with the applied science of civil engineering, 
where a fixed body of principles turned upon a 
mountain or a swamp will yield invariable 
results. Indeed, it will never be easy to teach 
the liberal arts; and we have increased the 
burden of the task by an obstinate conservatism 
which clings to the old because it has been 
successful and distrusts the new because it 
may fail. The curriculum of liberal education 
is always and persistently behind the times. 
Nevertheless, we must try to make it effective. 
We must teach control over thought as well as 

1£3 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

control over matter; we must make America 
liberal as well as efficient, or drop back from 
civilization. 

If we have failed to do so, it is chiefly because 
the American college and the American student 
and the American parent have persistently 
misunderstood the nature, the value, and the 
purpose of liberal education. The schools and 
colleges, for example, fought science as a liberal 
subject for a quarter of a century after Huxley 
had demonstrated its cultural value. The 
student supposed to be studying the "liberal 
arts" wandered often through the curriculum, 
like a man in a dream, not knowing what he 
wanted or why he wanted it. The parents 
who did not want their sons to become spe- 
cialists were as vague in their conceptions 
of the education they favored as the entrance 
candidate who wrote, " The Greeks put athletics 
into their colleges and so invented modern 
education." Prejudice and ignorance have 
sadly hampered liberal training in America. 
There is real danger of a victory for "voca- 
tionalism" more costly than many a defeat. 

A working country, full of unskilled im- 
migrants, governed by the masses or their 

124 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

representatives, whose highly educated classes 
are all-powerful neither in politics nor in finance, 
such a country will and should desire vocational 
education. The thing is so inevitable that one 
wonders far more at the sleepy endurance of 
purely theoretical education for generations 
than at the demand only a few decades old 
for technical education in the colleges and the 
still more recent clamor for a secondary-school 
training in the business of life. To oppose such 
a desire by empty talk about the unique value 
of the humanities as a means of educating every- 
body is as dangerous as it is foolish. To hold 
back from our obligation to improve the work- 
ing efficiency of the race is a plain dereliction. 
Every impartial observer must welcome the 
progress of vocational education, whether in 
institutes for the negroes, public schools, or 
Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. 

No one need fear that we may be too suc- 
cessful in teaching the vocations. The danger 
lies in the possibility that when the vocation- 
alists have forced their program upon the 
somewhat reluctant schools they may be as 
blind in their triumph as their opponents have 
been obstinate in their conservatism. Culture 

125 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

will persist against most odds. The desire 
to think truly, to live finely, is inherent in every 
high civilization. You cannot eliminate it by 
restricting the liberal studies which by common 
consent contribute to its development. Men 
are born into the world every day who in al- 
most any conceivable environment will strive 
after culture and in some measure attain it. 
Leadership in any direction brings with it the 
possession of culture in its rudiments and the 
desire for more. Whether or not a nation is 
educated liberally, it will have its cultured 
classes. And while in a modern democracy 
these classes may not control the government, 
they are bound to lead thought and sooner or 
later to inspire important action. Therefore, 
if the impetuous cohorts who are demanding 
an education completely vocational in our 
schools, and to a less extent in our colleges, 
should conquer without restraint; if in their 
hour of victory they should make their system 
as inflexible in its exclusion of all that is not 
"practical" as the "culturists" would gladly 
make theirs exclusive of all that bears directly 
upon work in the world, a dangerous separa- 
tion of classes would inevitably result. 

126 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

In the late Roman Empire the governing 
class, which was recruited from men with a 
legal plus a liberal education, became more and 
more distinct from the military class, made 
up in general of professional fighters whose 
training had been exclusively vocational with 
that end in view. "But as these hardy vet- 
erans," says Gibbon, speaking of the barbarians 
and their control of the legions in the early 
fourth century, **who had been educated in 
the ignorance or contempt of the laws, were 
incapable of exercising any civil offices, the 
powers of the human mind were contracted by 
the irreconcilable separation of talents as well 
as professions. The accomplished citizens of 
the Greek and Roman republics, whose char- 
acters could adapt themselves to the bar, the 
senate, the camp, or the schools, had learned 
to write, to speak, and to act with the same spirit 
and with equal abilities." As a result, a popula- 
tion competent to govern but not to defend 
itself was exposed by an army scornful of civi- 
lization to the fury of the savage North. 

I know too well the dangers of analogy 

between modern civilization and the Roman, 

to use this example as more than a useful 
9 127 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

illustration of my point. If we exclude or 
unduly delimit a liberal training in our colleges, 
and especially in our schools, as sure as night 
follows day there will be a decrease, and a 
sharp one, in the intellectual sympathy which 
makes intellectual leadership possible. Cut out 
history, cut out literature, cut out mathe- 
matics beyond its elements, and in a stroke 
you cut three of the bonds that unite so- 
ciety. 

If this statement of the case is too figurative, 
give it a more practical turn. Journalism is 
the most powerful agent of government in 
America; and the potentialities of journalism for 
good government are largely conditioned by its 
power to present facts, arguments, ideas to 
the multitude. Already it has been necessary 
to reduce the political nourishment thus offered 
to the last degree of digestibility. But so far 
the writer of an editorial or a news article has 
been able to count upon a body of knowledge 
and a training in thought common to all. In 
the eighteenth century it took several decades 
for the French peasant to comprehend the ideas 
of liberty and equality which the philosophers 
labored so hard to present to him. The il-. 

128 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

literate immigrant hears without comprehen- 
sion what the New York school-boy now under- 
stands with ease. Cut out history from the 
schools, and a section of the student's brain will 
cease to react to the thought of the editorial- 
writer; cut out literature, and in another 
direction his responses will die; reduce mathe- 
matics, and he will relax his grasp upon ab- 
stract thought. Abolish liberal education for 
the masses, confine their training to the narrow 
limits of manual exercise and the mental dis- 
cipline directly involved in the production of 
wealth, and they will be insulated from such 
broader movements of the intellect as good 
journalism represents almost as effectively 
as if cotton were stuffed in their ears and their 
eyes blinded. The separation of classes that 
will follow will be more dangerous than the 
industrial separation, because it will be intel- 
lectual and spiritual in its divergences. 

All this, of course, is no argument against 
vocational education. It is a plea for in- 
telligence on the part of the advocates of greater 
working efficiency in America. It is a plea for 
an irreducible minimum of liberal education be- 
yond which the upholders of vocational train- 

129 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

ing will proceed at their peril and to the na- 
tion's prejudice. 

Far more important than the vain quarrels 
of conservative and radical is the dijQScult 
endeavor to discover the limits of this irre- 
ducible minimum. I speak only for the col- 
leges. In the colleges we propose to educate the 
leaders in the higher vocations, the leaders in 
culture and in thought. But if a common 
bond of knowledge and point of view is essential 
for the nation at large, it is none the less essential 
for its so-called educated class. The mechan- 
ical engineer must have some comprehension 
of forces beyond those material ones with which 
it is his business to contend. If he is to labor 
in a struggle for social betterment with the 
lawyer, the doctor, the professor, and the bank 
president, he must know their language and they 
his. All must have some common introduc- 
tion into thought. Life itself, of course, 
supplies, as it requires, a bond of union. But 
how foolish not to prepare for this bond in 
the preparation for life which we call educa- 
tion! The irreducible minimum of a liberal 
education in college is a generous proportion 
of energy spent upon the liberal arts. And this 

130 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

energy must be expended in defiance of the 
pressure that a complex technical training 
exerts upon the student whose studies are to 
be chiefly vocational. 

The grotesque vision of a race of specialists 
— engineer animals, business animals, law ani- 
mals — burrowing, scratching, building in their 
world, each incredibly eflScient in his own 
metier, like the swallow, the ground-hog, or the 
ant, each unable to communicate or co-operate 
with his neighbor specialist, is worthy of the 
pen of Anatole France. As a reality, however, 
it is impossible — ^but not because such inhu- 
man specialists could not be developed. Their 
prototypes exist already in every American 
university, and still more abundantly in every 
American city, where engrossing business has 
shut out the view of fields, sky, God, the value 
and purpose of life itself. Such a race is im- 
possible because a civilization of absolute spe- 
cialists would fly apart like a bursting bomb 
and leave nothing behind but fragments and a 
stench. 

The irreducible minimum of cultural train- 
ing is not the only issue for which the believer 
in both kinds of education must contend. He 

131 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

must also protest against a wide-spread mis- 
conception of what is "practical" in education. 

What is "practical" in education? We 
cannot accept the answer of the youth who is 
taking a "culture course" because it is the 
thing to do. He muddles through his work, 
absorbing only what is injected by forcible 
feeding, explaining in moments of fancied 
sincerity that, since culture is not "practical," 
it is not worth real work. What nonsense! 
In a state of savagery nothing is practical that 
does not support life or save it. In civiliza- 
tion everything is practical that enables one 
to live happily in a complex environment. 
The ability to survey a field is practical, but 
so in equal measure is the power to reason 
correctly from historical analogy; so is the 
power to enjoy intelligently a good book. A 
liberal education, for the right man, is more 
practical than any other. And the right man 
for a liberal training is any and every student 
who will profit more certainly by a general 
education in the fundamentals of living than 
by a special training in technical knowledge. 

Nevertheless, one sees dozens of boys un- 
fitted by their tastes and aptitudes for technical 

132 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

work, although thoroughly educatable along 
more general lines, who have been sent to en- 
gineering schools or laboratories in order to 
get a practical education. I know farmers and 
bankers who, as a result of such an error, have 
been trained as mechanical engineers, lawyers 
and business men who have been trained as 
chemists, only to put their practical specialty 
in their pockets and forget it. Could anything 
be more impractical? Could anything be more 
wasteful than a special education which ex- 
cludes by its rigorous demands all higher in- 
struction in general knowledge and then is 
discarded? Could any one be less valuable 
to society than a business man, let us say, 
who fails after ten years and then proposes 
to fall back upon his never-digested and now 
forgotten training as a civil engineer? And yet 
this is where our distrust of a liberal education 
has too often led us. It is a melancholy but 
illuminating spectacle to watch the progress 
of those unfortunate undergraduates who are 
urged by pressure from behind to become 
practical in a way that for them is the reverse. 
Some go upon the rocks and sink before their 
sophomore year; some yield up the helm and 

133 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

drive on toward the limbo of the second-rate, 
from which native talent alone can save them; 
others, after tacking from shoal to shoal, take on 
board a new pilot, come back to the starting-line, 
and begin their education again with better pros- 
pects at the expense of wasted energy and time. 
In the preceding paragraph I have written 
of a group of Americans in no way distinguished 
by hidden longings for culture, by esthetic 
qualities that set them apart from the every- 
day, or by any rarity of spirit. I have in mind 
merely a thoroughly normal youth who happens 
to be non-technical instead of technical in 
his interests, who, if left to himself, will drift 
toward business or law rather than the profes- 
sions that require a closer specialization and 
more definite taste. Such a man will profit by 
the liberal arts, even if he never becomes "cul- 
tured," for even a modest knowledge honestly 
gained of history, literature, the languages, 
scientific, social, and political thought, must 
influence his life. Such a man will waste his 
energies in vocational studies. But the perverse 
blindness of America to what is really practical 
in education carries with it a menace against a 
far smaller but an even more important class. 

134 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

It is impossible to study the individuals 
that surround us without observing that, to 
borrow the expressive terms of heredity, cer- 
tain traits are recessive, others dominant. In 
the majority of our friends and neighbors, 
strong and delicate imagination, moral sensi- 
tiveness, keen sensibility, spirituality, and the 
religious instinct are all of them recessive. 
In a smaller number, one or more of these rarer 
qualities appear. In a minute minority all, 
or most of them, are dominant. This minute 
minority, with the more numerous body who are 
united to them by one bond or another of sym- 
pathy, are not the leaders of society, though in 
some measure they may be the salt of the earth. 
Much of the rough work of the world, and some 
of the noblest, must be accomplished by men of 
a coarser and perhaps a firmer mold. But such 
men and women are indispensable to civiliza- 
tion. They preserve the vision without which 
the nation perishes. They make the art that 
interprets life and adorns it. In times of moral 
crisis it is their surer instinct that saves us, if 
'we are saved. Their finer spirits only are proof 
against the allurements of easy wealth or the 

specious necessities and rude intoxication of 

135 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

war. The province which the psychologists 
of earher periods assigned with more necessity 
than truth to women belongs in the future to 
these men and women who are qualified to feel 
and think truly where others think and act in 
error. 

- But it is precisely for all who belong in one 
respect or another to this order of humanity 
that a strong and confident course in the liberal 
arts is most essential. Without such a course, 
and the public opinion it implies, there is con- 
stant danger that their native instincts will be 
starved or thwarted. In a country where 
such gifts as theirs may be called impractical, 
and in colleges where their talents must be 
developed in an atmosphere of doubt and dis- 
trust, in the company of those who dally with 
the liberal arts while despising them, they 
are exposed to the temptations of dilettanteism 
and the dangers of diversion from their proper 
careers. If a fondness for books, or a love of 
nature, or responsiveness to music, or any other 
of the symptoms that in early youth are likely 
to indicate such minds as I have described, 
are in America regarded as signs of effeminacy 

or presumptive failure; if, when it comes to 

136 



CULTURE AND PREJUDICE 

education, we try to make them practical in 
the current and fallacious sense of the word, 
why, then again we are impractical. The 
liberal arts conserve such spirits as these and 
turn their dreams into acts and power. America 
has as yet scarcely learned the lesson that the 
rarer gifts of the earth, if wasted, can be re- 
placed, if at all, only at a heavy cost. When 
shall we apply the moral to the conservation 
of the rarer qualities of man.^^ 

I began with a paradox which I hope is no 
longer paradoxical. The education we offer in 
America, with all its defects, is more reasonable 
than the attitude of American parents and 
American students toward a choice between its 
varieties. Through an obstinate refusal to 
consider the different capabilities that inhabit 
different men they have tried again and again 
to put the wrong key in the wrong lock and 
have grumbled because the door has not opened. 
As for the schools and the colleges, they have 
made cultural and vocational education the 
subject of clamorous controversies, whereas all 
depends upon the boy — upon the training that 
will educate him, and which, therefore, in the 
only true sense of the word, will be practical. 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

THE writer of fiction may be said, with 
only a pardonable exaggeration, to put 
himself in the place of the Almighty. Venturing 
to create a man, he shapes the character of his 
creature, molds and refines his brain, and pre- 
pares a living instrument by which events and 
circumstances can be controlled or directed 
toward a reasonable destiny. If he is a bad 
writer, the results deceive only children. But 
if he is modest enough to study life, and im- 
itate it, then he shares the mysterious power 
of creative evolution and earns his tribute of 
respect. 

The teacher also feels — at least in his remote 
subconsciousness -— that he shares or should 
share this power. He, too, must make char- 
acter, brains, eflSciency; and if the part he 
plays is relatively small, at least when he labors 
over a boy in whom the man is still uncreated, 

138 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

he is engaged in no work of the imagination 
merely. Except for the parent, he is the only 
professional on the job; and, next to the parent, 
he is held most responsible for the result. The 
praise usually goes to the amateur elements in 
the task — ^friends, college spirit, the rigors of 
athletics, and environment; the blame falls 
upon the professional educators — ^the parents 
and himself. 

I am not much concerned with the justice 
or the injustice of his claim for services ren- 
dered. This is one of the questions that must 
go up to the Supreme Court of the Last Judg- 
ment, for no sublunary arbitrator can disen- 
tangle the evidence. I merely wish to explain 
the earnestness with which each college pro- 
fessor accepts his responsibility, and asks, as 
he looks over his entering classes, "Who among 
you shall be saved?" 

He means, of course, "Who among you shall 
be educated.?" — that he identifies salvation and 
education is due to his professional bias, and 
may be taken for what it is worth. When a 
college education became fashionable, when the 
little file of the sons of ministers and lawyers 
entering the college gates was joined and sub- 

139 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

merged by the multitude of everybody's sons- 
rich, poor, stupid, brilliant, ambitious, and the 
opposite — his question first became acute. 
Now it is burning. Shall the colleges spend 
their abundant energies and their great, if not 
too effective, powers upon the few fit, or upon 
the mass, the multitude of the mediocre? 
Shall we seek quality or quantity? I know 
that the question has been answered a hundred 
times in history; but it has not been answered 
for twentieth-century America. For America 
just now provides the greatest exhibit the world 
has ever seen of successful mediocrity. 

There are no contented poor on this side 
of the Atlantic except in the backwaters of the 
East. There is no single class content to rec- 
ognize the intellectual or material superiority 
of the rest. Every one is pushing onward and 
upward. The poor man, as we are told every 
day, may be rich to-morrow; the ignorant goes 
to night-school and will learn; the drummer 
hopes to run the business for which he is travel- 
ing; the hired man will own land as good as 
that he plows; the clerk will be a partner in 
the firm. Even in the universities no institu- 
tions like the fellowships of Oxford and Cam- 

140 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

bridge can exist. In America not even the 
scholar is wiUing to stop at such a position. 
He must go on — or try to go on — as far as the 
rest. Never before has a nation exhibited so 
complete a spectacle of millions of insects all 
swarming upward toward the light. 

This viewmay be optimism. I do not think so. 
For in nine hundred cases out of a thousand 
the goal of all this striving is mediocrity. Your 
son nowadays does not hope to be President. 
He climbs toward a much lower round in the 
ladder. The laborer wishes to reach the 
middle class. The middle class wishes to be 
richer. The upper class — if we have one — 
hopes to make sure of its perch. Our cities 
reflect the spirit. They rise like the wind from 
the empty prairie or the dense forest into a 
reasonable similitude of the "business district" 
of St. Louis or Chicago, and then stick at a 
level of ugliness which is not the less ugly for 
being metropolitan. Our homes show it. A 
semi-colonial with porcelain tubs and hardwood 
floors bounds the imagination of all but the 
artistic temperament or the millionaire. Our 
literature shows it most distinctly of all. 
American newspapers and magazines main- 

141 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

tain, perhaps, a higher average of composition 
than is to be found elsewhere, and seldom rise 
above that average. We show it ourselves; 
for consider how much the speech of one Amer- 
ican business man resembles that of another. 
You can sojourn for days in smoking-cars, 
hotel corridors, or cafes without encountering 
an idea that descends to the naive ignorance 
of the peasant or lifts above mediocrity. Even 
our multimillionaires, the characteristic "great 
men" of America, although in the manipula- 
tion of natural resources they have risen above 
the ordinary, seem to be mediocre as person- 
alities. The newspapers are generous of space 
to every episode in their domestic history; yet 
what could be flatter than their remarks as 
reported by strangers who have rescued them, 
unaware of their greatness, from a broken-down 
automobile; what less illuminating than their 
comments on success in life; what less interest- 
ing than their lives when once the millions have 
been made? As a nation, we are mediocre. 

This may be pessimism. I do not think so. 
It is the very essence of the American exper- 
iment that a vast body of men and women 
should be raised as a whole to a level of comfort, 

142 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

of intelligence, of happiness, which, if far below 
the best, should be also far above the worst. 
And this involves, this requires an enormous 
increase in the total amount of mediocrity. 
Democracy and free immigration combined 
inevitably make for such a result. It had to 
come; and our day's work is still to bring more 
and more of the illiterate, the incapable, the 
unfortunate up to the level of the mediocre, 
even though the burden weighs us down, and 
the result seems to point toward a future that 
is drab and dull and commonplace. No race can 
escape from its circumstances, and these, in part 
by choice, in part by the chance of inheritance 
in a rich and undeveloped continent, are ours. 
I would not deal so freely in generalizations 
if I did not feel that they were self-evident; 
nor would I write of this subject at all if I 
did not believe that it lay on the very heart of 
the American colleges. I do not suppose that 
the college is more vital in American life than 
any one of a dozen agencies committed by 
nature to idealism and usefulness. But I 
think that no individual confronts more in- 
evitably the problem of the mediocre than the 
professor in an American college. 

lo 143 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

For see the mass of undergraduates which 
are drawn from all the social classes, but chiefly 
from those that have already attained medioc- 
rity, and flung at his head. Among them, to 
be sure, are a few of the brilliantly ambitious 
who will use more than can be given to them; 
but in far greater numbers are the brilliant and 
unambitious who will use nothing unless it is 
forced upon them, the stupid but well-meaning 
who have to be fed with a spoon, and the back- 
ward and unmeaning who must be cudgeled 
along after the rest. Where shall the bewil- 
dered teacher apply his goad? Whom shall he 
permit to fall behind? How shall he keep 
pace with the leaders without scattering the 
herd? 

There can be no question as to personal 
choice. I have heard more than one man of 
experience remark that there is no pleasure in 
teaching an undergraduate whose grade is 
below seventy-five per cent.; and, while I do 
not believe it, I have seldom heard the state- 
ment contradicted. Indeed, in the universities, 
the best scholars on the faculty, unless they 
love teaching for itself or are controlled by 
necessity or circumstance, gravitate generally 

144 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

toward small and selected classes or graduate 
work. And it would be easy and pleasant for 
all of us to concentrate upon the exceptional 
students — to educate them, even if the rest 
should go unwashed by the waters of knowledge. 
When circumstances are favorable, the forcing 
of a needle into soft iron is not more difficult 
than to push one really new idea into an imma- 
ture brain. But if circumstances are unfa- 
vorable, if there are thirty brains of all ranges 
of capability to be manipulated, the difficulty 
is multiplied. I can give one or two men with 
good minds and a good environment behind 
them — I can give them, if they want it, a com- 
prehension of the strange and moving literary 
force called romanticism, which, springing from 
obscure reactions in the psychology of a race, 
spreads through thought and speech and action 
until it transmutes into literature and becomes 
a rosy semblance of the life men would desire 
to lead in a world shaped by their imagination. 
Or I can try to give the same conception to 
all thirty, knowing that half the minds will be 
as blank as before, that most of the remainder 
will return confused and broken images of the 
truth perhaps less valuable than blankness, 

145 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

and that the few fit will profit less, because, 
of necessity, less has been given them. 

The literal - minded will probably reply, 
"Don't try to teach romanticism." Well, I 
do not — to elementary classes. But this merely 
alters the terms of the problem — the solution 
will be the same. It would be easiest, it would 
be pleasantest, it would seem to be most efficient 
in the American colleges, to sacrifice the 
mediocre to the able, to dismiss quantity and 
hold fast to quality. And yet every one 
knows that this is precisely what we do not do. 
Every one knows, or can find out for the asking, 
that in our schools and all our undergraduate 
departments nine-tenths of our labor is spent 
upon those least able or least likely to profit 
by the results. 

The cynic will remark that our perversity is 
due to the attitude of the powers that be, who, 
in the contemporary college, are almost as 
sensitive to the merits of quantity as the 
"boosters" of a Western town. The cynic 
would be partly right. We are still in the 
pioneering stage in the college world — or think 
that we are— where sheer numbers seem nec- 
essary in order to hold down the investment. 

146 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

And yet the pressure supposed to be exerted 
in order to keep classes large is so much less — 
at least in colleges of a high rank — ^than is 
popularly supposed, that I am inclined to think 
this motive unimportant in the problem. 

It is not a crude desire to keep the college 
"big"; nor is it weak human nature, hesitating 
to eliminate a nuisance when that nuisance is a 
friendly, fresh-spirited boy; it is the American 
passion for democracy that makes us lavish our 
energies upon the multitude of the mediocre. 
For a belief that the right to an education is as 
universal as freedom is ingrained in the Amer- 
ican mind. The college professor may never 
have recognized this as the cause of his perverse 
devotion to the mediocre. He may never have 
said, he may never have thought, "If the 
republic is to be saved it is by raising the average 
of intelligence." But his actions prove that 
somewhere in his subconsciousness this belief 
is stirring. It is this hidden passion that 
manifests itself in the attitude I have called 
perverse. 

This passion for democracy is the most 
sincere and possibly the most valuable quality 
in our whole educational system. When I 

X47 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

glimpse its subterranean motives I know why 
my heart is sore if the ninety-and-nine average 
men are unmoved by my teaching, even though 
the hundredth man has responded beyond 
my hopes. But when I calculate its effects 
I realize that it is responsible for some of the 
difficulties in which American education floun- 
ders. It is the quintessence of a noble idealism; 
but we have followed it blindly; and sometimes 
it has led us into the mire. 

Everywhere but in so-called graduate work, 
and in some measure even there, this desire 
to do something for every one has made us 
neglect the exceptional man and actually favor 
the mediocre. There is no question, I think, 
as to the fact, and a comparison of the best 
products of English and Continental training- 
schools with our own graduates will bring it 
home. They permit fewer men to call them- 
selves educated; but these men are more highly 
trained, more efficient intellectually, than ours. 
In science, in scholarship, as in literature, we 
still look Eastward for leaders. 

In the past our deficiencies were due to in- 
ferior equipment and less extensive resources. 

But now we can offer neither poverty nor im- 

148 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

maturity as an excuse. Our failure to provide 
the best possible education for the best men 
can be attributed only to our desire to give 
every man his equal chance, a desire which, 
more deeply interpreted, means that we have 
preferred universal mediocrity to an aristocracy 
of brains and a commonalty of ignorance. We 
educate a class, not individuals. We boast of 
the type, of the average our colleges produce. 
In my own university one hears far less of 
Jonathan Edwards, of Evarts, of Calhoun, or of 
Stedman than of the "Yale man." This in- 
direct evidence, I think, is even more significant 
than the results of matching Harvard with 
Oxford or Columbia with Berlin. 

Are we wrong .^ Am I absurd when I feel 
that my class must come forward as a body — 
the lazy millionaire's son, the earnest child of an 
uncouth immigrant, the able inheritor of suf- 
ficient brains — must come forward, all of them, 
or the year's work is not well done? I do not 
think so — for I believe in the American ex- 
periment. I believe in the passion for democ- 
racy — even when misguided, even when blind. 

But it is blind. That is the chief criticism 
one has to offer. The French of the Revolution 

149 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

were so afraid of aristocracy that in the new 
republic they reduced all titles to "citizen." 
We have been so afraid of slighting the democ- 
racy that in the colleges we have reduced all 
education to an average. The needless folly 
of limiting ourselves to such a program is 
manifest. We have energy enough and to 
spare, and money to make the mare go faster 
and farther than any one has yet driven her. 
It is perfectly possible to give signal ability 
its proper opportunity without failing in our 
duty to the multitudinous mediocre. This is 
not an argument for aristocracy in education. 
It is common sense. For we need leaders in 
the American experiment quite as much as a 
continuously rising democracy. And in the next 
stage of development we shall need them more. 
The establishment of "honor" schools and 
"honor" courses is a tardy and so far rather 
imperfect recognition of this fact. I have no 
program to propose for their development. 
Its details must be settled in the colleges, not 
in an essay. But when we see that our admi- 
rable loyalty to the democratic ideal has held 
us back at the same time that it has kept 
us true to destiny, we shall put more intelligence 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

into our reforms. The college must continue 
to be an institution for the increase of medioc- 
rity, for mediocrity is infinitely preferable to 
ignorance; but it must also provide the ex- 
ceptional man with the training by which he 
alone can profit. Like the Yankee contrivance 
which can be used for both ladder and chair, 
it must perform both the functions demanded 
of it, even at the risk of being less than best 
in one of them. 

The worst fault, however, into which our 
age-long service of mediocrity has led us is a 
weak-kneed, pusillanimous deference to medioc- 
rity itself. The college has borrowed the vice 
from every-day American life. For example, 
the most deadly weapon in the yellow journal- 
ist's armory is the t«-m "high-brow." A 
politician may be called "grafter," "boss," or 
even "muckraker," and escape unscratched; 
but if he is denounced as a "high-brow," and the 
label sticks, his career is ended. A playwright 
or a novelist may be written down as "cheap," 
he may be said to plagiarize, he may be shown 
to be vicious or unclean, without serious damage 
to his reputation; but let him be proved a 
"high-brow" and the public will fly from him 

151 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

as if he were a book-agent. Now the wide- 
spread American beHef that knowledge makes 
a man impractical is responsible for some of 
this curious odium; but far more is due to our 
servile deference to mediocrity. The weight of 
public opinion is usually against the expert, 
the specialist, the thinker, the exceptional man 
in general; for public opinion, whether right 
or wrong, is always mediocre; and there are 
few among us who do not in this respect yield 
somehow, somewhere, to public opinion. The 
doctor distrusts the advanced political theorist, 
the politician distrusts the advanced dramatist, 
the dramatist sneers at the innovations of sci- 
ence. We are all made timid by the enormous 
majorities that uphold mediocrity. 

The college is like a salt pool on the ocean 
shore, where young sea-things are growing in the 
gentle wash of waves that come from the world 
without. There is a public opinion in college 
that is as like the public opinion without as a 
microcosm can be to a macrocosm. And just 
as the public opinion without favors mediocrity 
in everything but making money,, so this public 
opinion encourages mediocrity in everything 
but athletics and social advance. No need to 

152 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

dwell upon this. The fact is better known 
than the gradual change that has come over 
college ideals in the last decade, until now the 
minority in favor of culture, knowledge, mental 
keenness, and other attributes of a high civiliza- 
tion is comfortably large. 

But the majority still exists, and its burden 
weighs heavily. It is curiously difficult for a 
teacher who is no mental machine, but human, 
to estimate at his true intellectual value a fine 
young fellow who already possesses the "push" 
and the "punch" that are still sufficient for 
a reasonable financial success in America. It 
is enormously difficult to insist upon stand- 
ards of intellectual accomplishment above the 
mediocre level with which the public is content. 
Let the graduate be deficient in some category 
that even mediocrity has mastered — ^say, spell- 
ing or letter- writing or punctuation — and opin- 
ion howls him down; but in the higher depart- 
ments of theoretical knowledge the world outside 
is quite content with a fifty or sixty per cent, 
efficiency, and deprecates more as an accumula- 
tion of material not readily transmutable into 
cash. 

All this the teacher feels, and as his class 
153 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

become personalities to him, he inclines further 
and further toward their own opinion, the college 
world's opinion, everybody's opinion, of what 
a student should do and know. Then, at the 
crisis, the insidious, unrecognized passion for 
democracy, the subconscious feeling that it is 
his duty to raise this dead-weight as much as 
may be permitted him, enters to complicate 
the situation. He begins to overestimate me- 
diocrity, knowing that he niust serve it. His 
pride dictates, "The results, all things con- 
sidered, are not so bad." He blames himself 
for a meticulous idealism. He makes the fatal 
error of assenting to mediocrity, and thereby 
ends his career as an agent for raising it. Or 
he violently reacts against the service required 
of him, antagonizes his class, and becomes 
equally valueless, except for graduate work. 
Here is a familiar college tragedy. 

It is easy enough to fulminate from with- 
out against the *'low standards" of the colleges. 
Try to raise them and you will find that Amer- 
ica is on the other end of the lever. It is dif- 
ficult to meet such a situation without truckling 
to mediocrity; it is very diflBcult to fight the 
mediocre while loving democracy. 

154 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

It is difficult, but not impossible, and the 
difficulty would be less if those chiefly con- 
cerned — the faculty, the undergraduates, and 
the parents — could see the situation for what 
it is, and, so far as weak human nature per- 
mits, direct themselves accordingly. 

The faculty, unfortunately, are not exempt 
from the circumstances of the age in America. 
If you prick a college professor he will show 
mediocrity as frequently as his fellow-Christian. 
But he has this advantage — his profession must 
bear the brunt of the struggle to attain that 
comfortable average of intelligence which the 
American experiment demands. His profession 
must also sweat and toil to train the leaders 
without which that experiment must fail. If 
responsibility breeds strength, then he cannot 
remain mediocre. But it is not of his occa- 
sional mediocrity that I complain; it is of his 
frequent and unnecessary lack of vision, his 
failure to see that both of these ends must be 
sought. As a class, the teaching profession is 
most reprehensible for the first of the two 
errors of democracy that I have discussed in 
this essay — the failure to encourage the ex- 
ceptional man. 

155 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

Those faculty meetings whose rumbhngs 
echoed in our undergraduate world present to 
the philosophic mind a spectacle of earnest 
scholars anguishing through precious evening 
hours over Reilley's deficiencies in history, 
or the hopeless befuddlement of Jenkinson 
in the presence of untranslated French. The 
capable undergraduate who is doing his work, 
and beginning to profit by his education, has 
little place in their deliberations which, to 
paraphrase Dogberry, seem often to have for 
text, "If a man can learn, let him alone lest he 
learn more; but if he can learn nothing, let 
him be taught." And yet beneath this haze 
of cross-purposes there lies, as I have tried to 
show, an intuitive perception of a great service. 
They have pledged themselves, these scholars, 
to the democracy, and nobly, if sometimes 
blindly, they are laboring in its behalf. When 
their vision clears they will spend not more, 
perhaps, but certainly as much energy upon 
the intellectually predestined as upon the men- 
tally unregenerate in the American colleges. 

The undergraduate and his parents are 
guilty under the second count of the general 
indictment. They cater to mediocrity. As I 

156 



THE COLLEGES AND MEDIOCRITY 

talk to the loyal, energetic undergraduate out- 
side of the class-room, where he is not afraid 
to be himself, and as I meet his parents in the 
course of every-day life, I am convinced that 
here again the difficulty is quite as much a 
defect of vision as the pressure of unescapable 
circumstance. If the undergraduate could see 
the situation as it is, what would happen? 
If he could see what the time spirit sees, that 
he has consented to be part of the dead-weight 
of crude Americanism, to be raised with in- 
finite pains to an intellectual level only a little 
higher, where he may view the world only a 
little more broadly, with but a trifle more of 
truth! Would he be content with his part? 
I doubt it. For if there is one thing experience 
in an American university teaches it is this, 
that the undergraduate (who, after all, is a 
picked man, not the average of his race) is not 
so mediocre as he seems — is not nearly so me- 
diocre as the education he seems to desire. 

And the parents! — if they could glimpse 
what even the college sees: that when they 
send us their children with injunctions to think 
well, but not too well, they are bowing down 
to the leaden calf of mediocrity. If only they 

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COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

could realize that their boys are held back by 
such injfluence, are caught, like the pilgrim 
with his burden of sin, fast in the sands of me- 
diocrity! If they could know that the college 
which loves their sons and daughters fears 
them often enough, as counterweights in the 
slow uplift to which it is pledged! If they saw 
all this, would they be content with their part 
in American education? More than one en- 
couraging experience makes me sure of the 
response. 

And we need their aid — the aid of the parents 
and the aid of the undergraduates; for, until 
democracy reaches the level of its opportunities, 
or is proved a failure, the problem of medioc- 
rity will continue to exist. We cannot solve it 
by educating the best men only. We cannot 
solve it by slighting the able. We cannot es- 
cape it by pretending that mediocrity is good 
enough. We must bear its burden. But as we 
push on toward a distant and uncertain victory 
a clearer sight of the path we have chosen 
would save us from stumbling blindly and 
stupidly beneath the weight. 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND 
THE COLLEGES 

NOT long ago I saw a college professor drop 
into a chair at his club, glance over the 
table of contents of a well-known periodical, and 
fling it down in disgust. 

"I can't read the magazines," he snorted. 
"What is the matter with American literature.?" 

In the trolley that night I sat next to a busi- 
ness man who was studying the pictures of the 
same monthly. "Do you read that magazine?" 
I asked. 

"Part of it," he said, indifferently; "I sup- 
pose all of it is trash." 

I cannot see that such critics have a right 
to ask. What is the matter with American 
literature.? Superciliousness and indifference 
were never friends to criticism or to authors.? 
The worst way to improve a national literature is 
not to read it; and the next is to read it badly. 

II 159 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

I bought the magazine, and read it, all but 
the advertisements. It was not great literature 
— some of it was not even good literature — 
but it was certainly not "trash." A task in 
research once led me to read with thoroughness 
the magazines of the mid-nineteenth century, 
when English literature was, so the critics say, 
greater than now. They were not so good as 
this modern periodical — ^they were not nearly 
so good in average of content, even though here 
and there a poem or a story or an essay since 
become famous lightened the toil of reading. 
My professor, if he had lived in the mid- 
century, would never have grappled with the 
diffuse, sentimental writing that filled so many 
pages. He would have stopped with the table 
of contents, and missed perhaps a chapter 
of Vanity Fair, a sonnet of Longfellow's, a story 
by Poe, or an instalment of The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table. And my Philistine business 
man would infallibly have skipped these good 
things, read the bad, and proclaimed that most 
modern stuff was trash. 

What is it that makes us contemptuous 
when we come to current literature, and espe- 
cially to current American literature? Is it 

160 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

modesty? I doubt it. Is it hypocrisy? Do 
we sneer at our reading (for most of us do read 
the magazines, and with some interest, too) 
lest some learned critic or scornful foreigner will 
laugh at our taste? Or is it timidity because 
we lack confidence to discriminate between 
the good and the bad in current publications? 
Lowell said that there would never be an 
American literature until there was an Amer- 
ican criticism. If he meant that there must 
be great critics before there are great writers, 
the history of many literary periods is against 
him. But it is certain that until we are ready 
to stand by our books and periodicals — to be 
honest in our praise and blame, and intelligent 
in our discrimination — ^American literature, in 
spite of an occasional achievement of distinc- 
tion, must, as a whole, remain second-rate. 

To sneer at contemporary literature, whether 
native or foreign, because most of it must dis- 
appear in the test and trial of time, is more than 
ridiculous — it is dangerous. Of the hundred 
short stories of the month, ninety poor ones are 
less important than a single paragraph from 
Fielding or Thackeray, and yet the ten remain- 
ing may mean more to us than all but the best 

161 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

works of earlier centuries. We are partners 
in the literary speculations of our own age — 
mere investors in the established enterprises 
of earlier periods. In the works of our best 
fictionists the speech is our speech, the mode 
of thought our mode, the clothes, the streets, 
the events, the philosophy, our clothes, our 
streets, our remembered history, our philosophy. 
If it is to the so-called "classics" that we must 
go for eternal human nature and perfection of ex- 
pression tried and sure, it is in the "newest 
books," in the newspaper on its way from the 
press to the kindling-box, in the supposedly 
ephemeral magazine, that we must seek a record 
of ourselves as others see us, and find the self-ex- 
pression of our age. If literature is to be taken 
seriously at all, current literature is in some 
respects the most serious part of it — even the 
photo-play, even the comic supplement. It is 
like the breakers on the shore-front: the ocean 
lies behind, but it is in them that motion, 
energy, and life are concentrated and made 
manifest. Few take seriously our current 
literature, and that is why the bilious query 
of the supercilious and the indifferent, "What is 
the matter with American literatures^" is so 

162 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

irritating. It is because I, for one, do take 
it with enormous seriousness that I dare to 
ask the question myself. 

That there really is something wrong — at 
least with current American writing — the ev- 
idence proves only too readily. A comparison 
of American stories, articles, plays, poetry, 
with the product of Europe need not inspire 
a native reader with the despair that English 
critics profess to feel for us. Our writers are 
the cleverest in the world, barring only the 
French; and, in their special field of fiction and 
journalism, the most skilful and most vigorous. 
They have energy, versatility, promise, and 
for the most part are free from the marks of 
decadence visible in English paradox and French 
morbidity. But depth, truth, sincerity, are 
not so evident; nor is the craftsmanship which 
completes a perfect work. The best foreign 
plays are better made than our best native 
drama. The best English fiction strikes deeper, 
means more, is truer, than what we are accus- 
tomed to put forward as our most representative 
work, although one must except three or four 
of our chief writers if the scale is to tip against 

us. English poetry, on the whole, is more 

163 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

vital, more beautiful, more perfect than ours. 
And the cultivated American reader not only 
recognizes these differences, he exaggerates 
them. The journalistic humor that he laughs 
at he believes to be cheap, even when it is not 
— unless, like Mark Twain's, it comes in book 
form with its prestige stamped on the cover. 
Short stories more clever than anything being 
written in England he delights in, but does 
not wholly admire. Plays that hold his in- 
terest he damns with a "good melodrama, I 
suppose," at the end; and he calls the best 
sellers "virile," "wholesome," "stirring," or 
"sweet," without supposing for an instant that 
they are true. Current literature may tickle 
the current American reader, and it often plays 
successfully upon his emotions and his senti- 
ment; but like current religion, it seldom stirs 
him to faith. Its roots are not about his mind 
and his heart. 

There are two extremes, both well-marked, 
in American literature — ^the strenuous and the 
delicate. Between them is to be found that 
writing of the first order which, in despite of 
critical sneerers, we have for a century been 
producing, and the mass of featureless publica- 

164 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES ^ 

tion which has neither form, content, nor 
significance. The bulk of our circulating li- 
brary and news-stand literature belongs to the 
first extreme — that which I have called the 
"strenuous" order. It is loud-voiced, ag- 
gressive, marvelously lush in its growth, and 
loved of the multitude. In articles and edi- 
torials it affects the positive and the pictu- 
resque. It deals in paragraphs of three lines' 
length; and its subject-matter, while interest- 
ing, has little accuracy and a minimum of 
thoughtfulness. In fiction, it acquires such 
head-lines as "A Virile American Conquers the 
Love of a Beautiful Balkan Princess, and Wins 
Her by a Method which must be Read to be 
Appreciated." Its stories are built like can- 
tilever bridges, and their construction is quite 
as evident. The characters are like the clothes 
they wear in the illustrations — ready-made; 
and the advertising pages, devoted to the ideal 
American as he dresses in New York, present 
them quite as fittingly as the picture in color on 
the cover. Sometimes the theme is adventure, 
in which case the pace is rapid beyond hope 
of realization in this jaded world; sometimes 
it is business, and then we learn how luridly 

165 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

romantic are the lives of our bankers and 
brokers; sometimes it is pathos — then the 
tears are never far from the surface, and the 
honest American heart, be it never so prac- 
tical, is touched, or your money back; some- 
times it is humor, and this time, as the quo- 
tation from the press notice describes it, "you 
roll in excruciating delight upon the library 
rug, and only save yourself by herculean self- 
control from falling into the fireplace." 

I do not intend to be sarcastic. On the 
contrary, one must admire the abounding 
vitality of this literature of the democracy. 
It may not be "virile," but it certainly is 
vigorous. It may not be "literary," but what 
remains when you skip the "dramatic open- 
ings," the "happy endings," with "uplifts," 
the mere adventures, and the conventional 
characterizations — what is left after this con- 
tains much real literature, in which American 
conditions are mirrored with humor and with 
genuineness, and with a shrewdness that 
almost makes up for depth. The magazine 
that advertises, "This is the best number ever 
published in America," may be as disappoint- 
ing as certain "boosted" towns of the West, 

160 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

but it is likely to contain passages that really 
do depict America; and this is something that 
the merely "literary" may never accomplish. 

In fact, the strenuous, extravagant, aggress- 
ive school of American literature — the popular 
school — is as full of strength and confidence and 
promise for the future as American business. 
But it is far cruder than American business. 
It has less brains behind it. It is a plant that 
runs to vigorous stems and over-abundant 
leaves. It is lush in growth and not highly 
productive of valuable fruit, because as yet it 
is deficient in roots. 

The strenuous school is certainly preferable, 
however, to the other extreme — the delicate, 
scented variety of writing, which, though not 
hardy in our practical America, is replanted 
annually in astonishing abundance. This is a 
flower of art that the multitude who make 
popularity are ignorant of, and yet it, too, 
is typically American. In occasional con- 
tributions to the general magazines, in a hun- 
dred "paid-for-by-the-author" books, and in 
thousands of essays, stories, and poems read 
before clubs or printed for the few, there is a 
gentle, highly personal, highly polished style of 

167 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

composition which, if not hterature, is cer- 
tainly Hterary. People with no story to tell 
write it excellently and call it art; people 
with nothing to say polish their style and call 
it literature. As if by some survival of the 
curse of Babel, careful writing, discrimination 
in words, restraint, grace, beauty — ^all that 
goes to make a style — ^have become associated 
in America with the privately printed or the 
sparingly read. 

It would be invidious and merely con- 
fusing to single out examples. The kind of 
writing I have in mind is not restricted to in- 
dividuals, nor to given essays or stories. It is 
a tendency rather than a method, and shows 
its empty, graceful head as unmistakably when 
the commercial writer turns the spot-light upon 
his purple patches, or breathes soft sentiment, 
as in the labored mannerisms of the cultured 
dilettante. Nevertheless, there is an astonish- 
ing production of American work whose only 
recommendation is its literary form, though 
it is not literature in substance. In poetry, 
especially, the vice is prevalent; in truth, there 
seem to be as many poets as there are readers 

of new poetry; and a discouraging percentage 
X68 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

of their verse is mere graceful flower and leaf. 
The scribbling-itch, of course, is common to 
all nations; but the depressing factor here is 
that so much of what is really well written, 
artistically written, so much of the thoroughly 
civilized writing in our current literature, is 
of this fragile order; so much of what has real 
juice in it, real promise — fresh thought, keen 
observation, cogent truth — ^is slipshod, vulgar, 
iiglyj or warped by sensationalism and the 
fear of reality into a sentimental or exaggerated 
imitation of what the public is supposed to 
consider life. The one school runs to lush and 
wasteful growth, because it sends no roots 
down into the heart of America. The other, 
for all its grace and perfect form, is not hardy, 
is not at home among us, because it, too, is 
not well rooted in our soil. 

No one will deny that we lose by this; those 
least who know and admire the work of the 
many American writers who, in the face of 
discouraging conditions, are earning more dis- 
criminating praise than has yet been given 
them. Only the supercilious can fail to regret 
the vigorous imagination running waste in our 
** popular" productions — so little of it directed 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

to any end that may serve art and truth. Only 
the indifferent can see without regret that the 
study of perfection which leads to art is be- 
stowed chiefly upon subjects that contain little 
promise and no hearty life. Let us take from 
the comparison the few writers of whom we 
may well boast; let us confine ourselves to pure 
literature; and then admit that in the drama, 
in fiction, and in poetry we are just neither to 
our talents, to our needs, nor to our desires 
in literature. 

Excuses are as plentiful as blackberries — 
and, to a critic with some national pride, as 
sour. The commonest of them take the form 
of that ogre which lurks in all the dreams of 
culture — commercialism. It is a fallacy. Venice 
was commercial and had Giorgione and Titian. 
The Florence of Boccaccio was the center of 
fourteenth-century commercialism. The Hol- 
land of Rembrandt was commercial to the core. 
There is sure to be a vast output of low-grade 
literary ware when, as with us, the vast majority 
of readers are money-makers necessarily intent 
on their gains, and deprived of the leisure 
necessary to form a taste; exactly as there is 
an enormous production of the common con- 

J70 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

veniences of life — shoes, newspapers, collars, 
and phonographs. But this is no necessary 
deterrent to high-grade work. The more money 
the more chance for the artist with high ideals 
to live. Surely our industrial development 
since the Civil War has brought us to the level 
of old New England of seventy years ago, when 
the exploitation of the seaboard states had 
ended in an accumulation of wealth, and a free- 
ing of time and energy for our one great literary 
period. Commercialism may be a proffered 
excuse, but it certainly is not a necessary cause 
of our mediocrity in literature. 

America is too heterogeneous, too shifting, 
for mature literature, say others; it is so various 
in blood, so transitional in its civilization, as to 
offer few subjects for finished work. This is 
the critic's excuse. The thousands of writers 
who are satisfying the growing clamor for 
"something to read" do not present it. They 
are not troubled by lack of subjects, nor are 
they confused by the complexity and move- 
ment of our national life. It is true that they 
do not seem to get to the heart of this life; and 
it may be that they rush in where the wiser and 
less vigorous fear to tread. But what arrant 

171 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

nonsense it would be to hold off until New 
York and Chicago and the Pacific coast are 
"finished" — as an Englishwoman put it, assert- 
ing that they would be worth looking at when 
that time came. The scientist nowadays does 
not wait for his specimen to be full grown or 
dead before he begins his examination. Nor 
should we. There is no greater lack of homoge- 
neity among races here than among classes in 
Germany. There is as much significance in 
our mental and material development as in 
English pessimism or Russian melancholy. 
I admit the difficulty of making literature from 
towns that change their populations as they 
change their pavements, and a country still 
largely unassimilated. But if we lose one way, 
we gain another. Forests and mountain wilder- 
nesses, emigration and immigration, the clash 
of racial habits and ideals in an amalgamating 
society; industrial, moral, social transforma- 
tion — these are assuredly subjects for literature; 
and that they challenge originality and the 
interpretative imagination does not make them 
less interesting. And yet American literature 
does not live up to its opportunities. It is 
not so good as American machinery. And the 

172 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

trouble is neither commercialism nor a dearth 
of subjects; it is a lack of proper soil. It 
is the fault of the soil that our novels, plays, 
poetry, articles — unrefined and over-refined — 
lack the roots which would make them better 
literature. 

The soil from which good books grow is 
intelligence. Our current writing is clever, 
it is shrewd, and it is not wanting in imagina- 
tion; but, with due and grateful exception, it 
comes short in the meditated experience and 
thoughtful observation that spring from in- 
telligence. Its art is less bracing, less vital, 
than the best in our lives. Galsworthy, Wells, 
and Bennett are better novelists than any 
group of Americans; Shaw, Synge, and Barrie 
are better dramatists; Masefield and William 
Watson are better poets — not, I think, because 
they have more brains, more art, more imagina- 
tion, but because they use more. They strike 
deeper, perhaps because it is easier to do so 
in old soil, but also because deeper striking 
is required of them. 

The deficiency, however, is not, I believe, 
primarily with the writers. By all the laws 
of probability, we should have more than our 

173 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

share of literary genius. The American has 
shown himself more fertile in literary talent 
than in any other of the arts; and, furthermore, 
wave after wave of restless intellect has moved 
with successive immigrations across the sea 
to us. One of the great Welsh poets, says 
George Borrow, died in New Brunswick in 
North America. If the soil had been right, 
Henry James, Whistler, Sargent — to look at the 
matter differently — would have flourished here. 
If the soil were right, there would be genius 
to grow here. 

What we chiefly lack is intelligent readers. 
Good readers make good soil. No actor can 
act his best to a cold audience or an empty 
house. Nor can a writer write his best when 
there are none or few who will hear him. It is 
true that there have been independent geniuses, 
such as Browning and Shelley, who seem to 
have defied the neglect of the reader. If we 
could call forth such men, might we not make 
an American literature, regardless of what 
America wants? Unfortunately, rare spirits 
like theirs do not come at call; and even they 
are not entirely independent of the circum- 
stances in which they must write. Shelley, 

174 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

it is true, did his best work for an audience 
that was few as well as fit; but then his best 
work is the purest of lyric poetry, the most 
personal form of literature, the least dependent 
upon a circle of readers. As for Browning, his 
isolation was a prime cause of his obscurity 
when, as so often, he was needlessly obscure. 
Great writers do not come ready-made. Good 
readers help to make them. 

We are the greatest readers among the na- 
tions. Everybody in America reads — from the 
messenger-boy to the corporation president. It 
never was so easy to read as now in America. 
A journey is measured by discarded news- 
papers and magazines. Fifteen minutes on a 
trolley-car without something to read has 
become a horror. We read so much that the 
publishers, who do not expect us to think of 
what we are reading, crowd their books and 
magazines with illustrations in order to save 
us from embarrassment. This hunger and 
thirst for the printed page has resulted in a 
flood of writing that is good, but not too good; 
clever, but not too witty; emphatic, but not 
too serious, lest the unintelligent reader be 
confused, lest the intelligent reader have to 

12 175 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

waste his reading-time in thinking. A year 
of such indiscriminate perusing, and a man of 
good natural taste will swallow anything rather 
than be left without something to read. And 
we have been doing it for a generation! 

Hence it has come about that, while we are 
the greatest readers in the world, we are also 
the worst. We read too much to read intel- 
ligently. We are bad readers, some of us, 
because, like Benedick, we have "a contemptible 
spirit" for the books we spend our time over; 
but most of us because, if we have intelligence, 
we fail to use it when we read. If as great an 
exercise of sheer brain power were demanded 
from our novelists and our playwrights as from 
our engineers, superintendents, architects, and 
lawyers, a real literature would follow. But 
we cannot stop reading long enough to make 
such a demand. We have no time for a great 
creative literature. "People want to be made 
happy by their novels. They don't care about 
truth." "Any old stuff in a play will please 
the public, if there are laughs enough." So 
long as this can be said of the intelligent, 
educated men and women who determine true 
popularity, good writing in America will come 

176 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

only by accident. We are bad readers; and 
that is what is the matter with American 
literature. 

I do not mean to excuse either author or 
publisher. The author — so many think — ^un- 
derestimates the quality of his audience. Like 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, he does not dare to be 
as funny as he can. Often he is unwilling, 
often unable to pass the mark of "good enough." 
The publisher is certainly over-timorous, and 
much prefers the rear to the van of progressing 
taste. Nevertheless, the root of the difficulty 
lies elsewhere. Supply in literature may not 
be created, but it is inevitably conditioned, by 
demand. 

In the past a variety of circumstances, social 
and economic rather than intellectual, have 
made the American voracious and superficial 
in his reading. And this is true to-day, with 
the addition that France, England, and Ger- 
many are threatened by the same evil. There 
is only one remedy — education. How else 
can you prepare for intelligence.'^ Education 
in the broadest sense makes a good reader. 
In one of its departments — ^knowledge of life, 
shrewdness, common sense — we Americans are 

177 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

abundantly competent to read. It seems that 
in another department — ^the will to think, to 
interpret, to appreciate — we lag behind. Our 
colleges are blamed for their failure to turn out 
the authors of a great American literature. 
The charge is unjust, for not the most Utopian 
of universities could produce a great literature 
before it Was wanted. Let them be blamed 
rather for their failure to produce good readers. 
Great writers they can, at best, train and en- 
courage. Good readers they can make. 

In our society it is the college graduates 
who must make the soil for literature. Thanks 
to sheer numbers, they will form, in the gen- 
eration now under way, the majority of those 
who by competence or opportunity become 
readers of good writing; they will determine 
the policy of the better newspapers, the quality 
of the best magazines, the success of most books 
worthy of consideration. Are they reading 
better books than men and women who have 
never been to college? Are they asking that 
their fiction shall be truer, their plays more 
dramatic, their wit wittier, their articles more 
intelligent, than all that is purveyed for those 
without a degree.'^ In some measure, yes, espe- 

178 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

daily among the women; in the proper measure, 
emphatically no. And the reason is that the 
college graduate was too busy with other 
things to acquire intellectual interests in college. 
The undergraduate of to-day is certainly pos- 
sessed of a reasonable amount of intelligence; 
the criticism most justly made is that in in- 
tellectual matters he often fails to use it. It 
is easy to present him with information, and 
get it — ^not seriously damaged — back again. 
It is not difficult to make him comprehend 
theories, developments, conclusions, ideas. But 
it is hard to make him think. He will spend 
enormous sums on tutoring; he will memorize 
whole pages; sometimes he will even forego 
his degree, rather than thinlc. And as good 
reading demands a certain amount of thinking 
as a prime requisite, his books suffer in propor- 
tion to the laziness of his mind. If he enters 
business in after life, this defect in thoroughness 
is remedied by a stern necessity, and what 
intelligence has accrued to him he rapidly puts 
to work at full efficiency. In preparation 
for law and the professions generally, he passes 
through a period of higher training when think- 
ing is forced upon him. But when it comes to 

179 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

reading for pleasure, there is no such compul- 
sion. If he was lazy-minded in studying in col- 
lege, he will be lazier in reading afterward. If 
he was content with a sixty-per-cent. efficiency, 
he will scarcely seek a higher ratio of appre- 
ciation when there is only his own pleasure to 
consult. And how can a considerable literature 
— how can a really first-rate newspaper — ^be run 
for a man who does not care to comprehend 
more than, say, sixty per cent. ! 

It is not a duty I am urging. I suppose 
that we have a moral obligation to become 
better readers, but such an argument is quite 
unnecessary. If, crossing the hotel corridor 
to the man who is reading a novelized photo- 
play to rest his mind, I should say, "Dear sir, 
ought you not to be reading good literature?" 
I should expect the retort that Francis Thomp- 
son made upon the shoemaker who asked if 
he were saved. I have neither the right nor 
the desire to put such a question. I am more 
concerned with the pleasure and inspiration 
that the man in the hotel corridor, and his 
hundred thousand companions, are losing. 
What stories the really able American authors 

might write for him, if he were sufficiently 

180 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

interested in life to read them! What plays 
they would produce, if he would take the trou- 
ble to discriminate between drama and melo- 
drama; between sentiment and sentimentality; 
between wit and horseplay! What essays they 
would compose if they believed he could be 
interested by thought! If he would but spend 
upon current literature the loose change of his 
intellectual efforts, America might see the 
beginnings of a literary boom that even a 
California real-estate man would treat with 
respect. 

And, I repeat, I do not know where this is 
to begin if not in the colleges — ^unless, indeed, 
it is to begin in the schools and the homes that 
send us an undergraduate already predisposed 
to regard matter as more important than mind. 
Every modern nation has depended upon its 
schools and universities — not, it is true, to 
create literature, for genius has never required 
a degree, but to spread that intelligence, and 
still more that interest in intelligence, by whose 
warmth good books ripen into literature. The 
closer one looks at apparent exceptions — Eliza- 
bethan England, Italy of the Renaissance, 

Russia of the nineteenth century — the more 
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COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

clearly one sees that they are not exceptions, 
but merely confirm the rule. We shall get a 
distinctive literature when we are willing to 
appreciate one. We shall be willing and able 
to appreciate one when our education arouses 
intellectual interests as well as trains character 
and disciplines the mind. And this will happen 
when, among other things, boys and girls are 
sent to college to become intelligent. 

I shall probably be scoffed at by the jwo- 
fessional writer who has learned his trade in 
the school of experience, and condemned by the 
esthete who is more interested in culture than 
in life. The one will laugh at the idea that 
upon education can depend so unacademic a 
thing as creative literature. The other is too 
contemptuous of the masses to believe that our 
artistic welfare is bound up with theirs. But 
the facts are against them. The lack of art 
which foreign critics urge against our profes- 
sional literature is due, in part at least, to the 
lack of an audience that will demand it. The 
lack of vitality which is evident in our merely 
literary compositions is the result of writing 
for the sake of writing, in despite of those who 
will not read. No author is independent of 

182 



CURRENT LITERATURE AND COLLEGES 

his readers. He can distance them, but he 
cannot escape their influence. The novehst or 
dramatist who is urged to disregard popularity 
is quite right if he hesitates, and most excusable 
if, in making the attempt, he falters or fails. 
I have no formula for genius. But when we 
have good readers, we shall get that American 
literature of which now we have no less and 
no more than we deserve. 



WRITING ENGLISH 

DEEDS, not words/' is a platitude — a flat 
statement which reduces the facts of the 
case to an average, and calls that truth. It is 
absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that 
we may never judge a man by his words. 
Words are often the most convenient indices 
of education, of cultivation, and of intellectual 
power. And what is more, a man's speech, a 
man's writing, when properly interpreted, may 
sometimes measure the potentialities of the 
mind more thoroughly, more accurately, than 
the deeds that environment, opportunity, 
luck permit. It is hard enough to take the 
intellectual measure even of the makers of 
history, if we judge by their acts, so rapidly 
does the apparent value of their accomplish- 
ments vary with changing conceptions of what 
is and what is not worth doing. It is infinitely 
more difficult to judge in advance of youths 

184 



WRITING ENGLISH 



just going out into the world by what they do. 
Their words, which reveal what they are think- 
ing, and how they are thinking, give almost 
the only vision of their minds, and "by their 
words ye shall know them" becomes not a 
perversion, but an adaptation of the old text. 
Would you judge of a boy just graduated en- 
tirely by the acts he had performed in college? 
If you did you would make some profound 
and illuminating mistakes. 

This explains, I think, why parents and 
teachers and college presidents, and even un- 
dergraduates, are exercised over the study of 
writing English — which is, after all, just the 
study of the proper putting together of words. 
They may believe, all of them, that their con- 
cern is merely for the tangible rewards of the 
power to write well — the ability to compose a 
good letter, to speak forcibly on occasion, to 
offer the amount of literacy required for most 
"jobs." But I wonder if the quite surprising 
keenness of their interest is not due to another 
cause. I wonder if they do not feel — ^perhaps 
unconsciously — that words indicate the man; 
that the power to write well shows intellect, 
and measures, if not its profundity, at least the 

185 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

stage of its development. We fasten on the 
defects of the letters written by undergraduates, 
on their faltering speeches, on their confused 
examination papers, as something significant, 
ominous, worthy even of comment in the press. 
And we are, I believe, perfectly right. Speech 
and writing, if you get them in fair samples, 
indicate the extent and the value of a college 
education far better than a degree. 

It is this conviction that, pressing upon 
the schools and colleges, has caused such a 
flood of courses and text-books, such an expen- 
diture of time, energy, and money in the teach- 
ing of composition, so many ardent hopes of 
accomplishment, so much bitter disappoint- 
ment at relative failure. I do not know how 
many are directly or indirectly teaching the 
writing of English in America — perhaps some 
tens of thousands; the imagination falters at 
the thought of how many are trying to learn it. 
Thus the parent, conscious of this enormous 
endeavor and the convictions that inspire it, 
is somewhat appalled to hear the critics without 
the colleges maintaining that we are not teach- 
ing good writing, and the critics within pro- 
testing that good writing cannot be taught! 

18§ 



WRITING ENGLISH 



It is with the . teachers, the administrators, 
the theorists on education, but most of all the 
teachers, that the responsibility for the alleged 
failure of this great project — to endow the 
college graduate with adequate powers of ex- 
pression — must be sought. But these guardians 
of expression are divided into many groups, of 
which four are chief. 

There is first the great party of the Know- 
Nothings, who plan and teach with no opinion 
whatsoever as to the ends of their teaching. 
Under the conditions of human nature and 
current financial rewards for the work, this 
party is inevitably large; but it counts for 
nothing except inertia. There is next the 
respectable and efficient cohort of the Do- 
Nothings, who believe that good writing and 
speaking are natural emanations from culture, 
as health from exercise, or clouds from the 
sea. They would cultivate the mind of the 
undergraduate, and let expression take care 
of itself. They do not believe in teaching 
English composition. Next are the Formalists, 
who hold up a dictionary in one hand, the rules 
of rhetoric in another, and say, learn these, 
and good writing and good speaking shall be 

187 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

added unto you. The Formalists have weak- 
ened in late years. There have been desertions 
to the Do-Nothings, for the work of grinding 
rules into unwilling minds is hard, and it is far 
easier to adopt a policy of laissez-faire. But 
there have been far more desertions into a 
party which I shall call, for want of a better 
name, the Optimists. The Optimists believe 
that in teaching to write and speak the Amer- 
ican college is accepting its most significant if 
not its greatest duty. They believe that we 
must understand what causes good writing, in 
order to teach it; and that for the average 
undergraduate writing must be taught. 

The best way to approach this grand battle- 
ground of educational policies is by the very 
practical fashion of pretending (if pretence is 
necessary) that you have a son (or a daughter) 
ready for college. What does he need, what 
must he have in a writing way, in a speaking 
way, when he has passed through all the educa- 
tion you see fit to give him.^^ What should 
he possess of such ability to satisfy the world 
and himself? Facts, ideas, and imagination, 
to put it roughly, make up the substance of 
expression. Facts he must be able to present 

188 



WRITING ENGLISH 



clearly and faithfully; ideas he must be able 
to present clearly and comprehensively; his 
imagination he will need to express when his 
nature demands it. And for all these needs 
he must be able to use knowingly the words 
that study and experience will feed to him. 
He must be able to combine these words effec- 
tively in order to express the thoughts of which 
he is capable. And these thoughts he must 
work out along lines of logical, reasonable 
development, so that what he says or writes 
will have an end and attain it. In addition, 
if he is imaginative — and who is not — he should 
know the color and fire of words, the power of 
rhythm and harmony over the emotions, the 
qualities of speech whose secret will enable him 
to mold language to his personality and per- 
haps achieve a style. This he should know; 
the other powers he must have, or stop short of 
his full efficiency. 

Alas, we all know that the undergraduate, 
in the mass, fails often to attain even to the 
power of logical, accurate statement, whether of 
facts or ideas. It is true that most of the 
charges against him are to a greater or less de- 
gree irrelevant. Weighty indictments of his 

189 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

powers of expression are based upon bad spell- 
ing: a sign, it is true, of slovenliness, an in- 
dication of a lack of thoroughness that goes 
deeper than the misplacing of letters, but not 
in itself a proof of inability to express. Great 
writers have often misspelled; and the letters 
our capable business men write when the 
stenographer fails to come back after lunch are 
by no means impeccable. Other accusations 
refer to a childish vagueness of expression — due 
to the fact that the American undergraduate 
is often a child intellectually rather than to any 
defects in composition per se. But it is a 
waste of time to deny that he writes, if not 
badly, at least not so clearly, so correctly, so 
intelligently as we expect. The question is, 
why.^ 

It would be a comfort to place all the blame 
on the schools; and indeed they must take some 
blame, not only because they deserve it, but 
also to enlighten those critics of the college who 
never consider the kind of grain which comes 
into our hoppers. The readers of college en- 
trance papers could tell a mournful story of 
how the candidates for our Freshmen classes 
write. Here, for an instance, is a paragraph in- 

190 



WRITING ENGLISH 



tended to prove that the writer had a command 
of simple English, correct in sentence structure, 
spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The 
subject is "The Value of Organized Athletics 
in Schools"; not an abstruse one, or too acade- 
mic: 

If fellows are out in the open and take athletics 
say at a certain time e very-day; These fellows are 
in good health and allert in their lessons, while 
those who take no exercise are logy and soft. Or- 
ginized athletics in a school bring the former, while 
if a school has no athletics every-thing goes more or 
less slipshod, and the fellows are more liable to get 
into trouble, because they are nervious from having 
nothing to do. 

This is a little below the average of the papers 
rejected for entrance to college. It is not a 
fair sample of what the schools can do; but 
it is a very fair sample of what they often do 
not do. It was not written by a foreigner, nor, 
I judge, by a son of illiterate parents, since it 
came from an expensive Eastern preparatory 
school. The reader, marking with some heat 
a failure for the essay from which this paragraph 
is extracted, would not complain of the writer's 
paucity of ideas. His ideas are not below the 

13 191 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

average of his age. He would keep his wrath 
for the broken, distorted sentences, the silly 
spelling, the lack (which would appear in the 
whole composition) of even a rudimentary 
construction to carry the thought. Spelling, 
the fundamentals of punctuation, and the com- 
pacting of a sentence must be taught in the 
schools, or it is too late. It is too late to cure 
diseases of these members in college. They 
can be abated; but again and again they will 
break out. It is the school's business to teach 
them; and the weary reader sees in this un- 
happy specimen but a dark and definite man- 
ifestation of a widespread slovenliness in 
secondary education; a lack of thoroughness 
which appears not only in the failures, but also, 
though in less measure, among the better 
writers, whose work is too good in other re- 
spects not to be reluctantly passed. 

Again, it would be easy to place the blame 
for much of the slipshod writing of the under- 
graduate upon the standards set by the grown- 
ups outside the colleges. Editors can tell of 
the endless editing that contributions, even 
from writers supposed to be professional, will 
sometimes require. And when such a sentence 

192 



WRITING ENGLISH 



as the following slips through, and begins an 
article in a well-known, highly respectable 
magazine, we can only say, "If gold rust, what 
will iron do?" 

Yes the Rot — and with a very big R — in sport: 
for that, thanks to an overdone and too belauded a 
Professionalism by a large section of the pandering 
press, is what it has got to. 

Again, any business man could produce from 
his files a collection of letters full of phrasing so 
vague and inconsequential that only his busi- 
ness instincts and knowledge of the situation 
enabled him to interpret it. Any lawyer could 
give numberless instances where an inability 
to write clear and simple English has caused 
litigation without end. Indeed, the bar is 
largely supported by errors in English composi- 
tion! And as for conversation, conducted, I 
will not say with pedantical correctness, for 
that is not an ideal, but with accuracy and 
transparency of thought — listen to the talk 
about you! 

However, it is the business of the colleges 
to improve all that; and though it is not easy 
to develop in youth virtues which are more 

193 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

admired than practised by maturity, let us 
assume that they should succeed in turning out 
writers of satisfactory ability, even with these 
handicaps, and look deeper for the cause of their 
relative failure. 

The chief cause of the prevalent inadequacy 
of expression among our undergraduates is 
patent, and its effects are by no means limited 
to America, as complaints from France and 
from England prove. The mob — the many- 
headed, the many-mouthed, figured in the past 
by poets as dumb, or, at best, as an incoherent 
thing of brutish noises signifying speech — is 
acquiring education and learning how to express 
it. Hundreds of thousands whose ancestors 
never read, and seldom talked except of the 
simpler needs of life, are doing the talking and 
the writing that their larger share in the trans- 
action of the world's business demands. Indeed, 
democracy requires not only that the illiterate 
shall learn to read and write in the narrower 
sense of the words, but also that the relatively 
literate shall seek with their growing intellectu- 
ality a more perfect power of expression. And 
it is precisely from the classes only relatively lit- 
erate — those for whom in the past there has 

194 



WRITING ENGLISH 



been no opportunity, and no need, to become 
highly educated — that the bulk of our college 
students to-day are coming, the bulk of the 
students in the endowed institutions of the 
East as well as in the newer state universities 
of the West. The typical undergraduate is no 
longer the son of a lawyer or a clergyman with 
an intellectual background. 

There is plenty of grumbling among college 
faculties, and in certain newspapers, over this 
state of affairs. In reality, of course, it is the 
opportunity of the American colleges. Let 
the motives be what they may, the simple fact 
that so many American parents wish to give 
their children more education than they them- 
selves were blessed with is a condition so favor- 
able for those who believe that in the long run 
only intelligence can keep our civilization on 
the path of real progress, that one expects to 
hear congratulations instead of wails from the 
colkge campuses. 

Nevertheless, we pay for our opportunity, 
and we must expect to pay. The thousands of 
intellectual immigrants, ill-supplied with means 
of progress, indefinite of aim, unaware of their 

opportunities, who land every September at 

195 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

the college gates, constitute a weighty burden, 
a terrible responsibility. And the burden rests 
upon no one with more crushing weight than 
upon the unfortunate teacher of composition. 
That these entering immigrants cannot write 
well is a symptom of their mental rawness. It 
is to be expected. But thanks to the methods 
of slipshod, ambitious America, the schools 
have passed them on still shaky in the first 
steps of accurate writing — spelling, punctua- 
tion, sentence structure, and the use of words. 
Thanks to the failure of America to demand 
thoroughness in anything but athletics and 
business, they are blind to the need of thorough- 
ness in expression. And thanks to the ines- 
capable difficulty of accurate writing, they 
resist the attempt to make them thorough, 
with the youthful mind's instinctive rebellion 
against work. Nevertheless, whatever the cost, 
they must learn if they are to become educated 
in any practical and efficient sense; the im- 
migrants especially must learn, since they 
come from environments where accurate ex- 
pression has not been practised — often has not 
been needed — and go to a future where it will 
be required of them. Not even the Do-Nothing 

196 



WRITING ENGLISH 



school denies the necessity that the under- 
graduate should learn to write well. But how? 

The Know-Nothing school proposes no ul- 
timate solution, and knows none, unless faith- 
fully teaching what it is told to teach, and ac- 
cepting the sweat and burden of the day, with 
few of its rewards, be not in its blind way a 
better solution than to dodge the responsibility 
altogether. 

The Formalists labor over precept and prin- 
ciple — disciplining, commanding, threatening — 
feeling more grief over one letter lost, or one 
comma mishandled, than joy over the most 
spirited of incorrect effusions. They turn out 
sulky youths who nevertheless have learned 
something. 

The Do-Nothings propose a solution that is 
engaging, logical — and insufficient. They are the 
philosophers and the esthetes among teachers, 
who see, what the Formalists miss, that he who 
thinks well will in the long run write as he 
should. Their especial horror is of the com- 
pulsory theme, extracted from unwilling and 
idealess minds. Their remedy for all ills of 
speech and pen is: teach, not writing and 
speaking, but thinking; give, not rules and 

X97 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

principles, but materials for thought. And 
above all, do not force college students to 
study composition. The Do-Nothing school 
has almost enough truth on its side to be right. 
It has more truth, in fact, than its principles 
permit it to make use of. 

The umpire in this contest — who is the parent 
with a son ready for college — should note, how- 
ever, two pervading fallacies in this laissez-faire 
theory of writing English. The first belongs 
to the party of the right among the Do-Nothings 
— the older teachers who come from the genera- 
tion that sent only picked men to college; 
the second to the party of the left — the younger 
men who are distressed by the toil, the waste, 
the stupidity that accompany so much work 
in composition. 

The older men attack the attempt to teach 
boys to make literature. Their hatred of the 
cheap, the banal, and the false in literature 
that has been machine-made by men who 
have learned to express finely what is not worth 
expressing at all, leads them to distrust the 
teaching of English composition. They con- 
demn, however, a method of teaching that 
long since withered under their scorn. The 

198 



WRITING ENGLISH 



aim of the college course in composition to-day 
is not the making of literature, but writing; 
not the production of imaginative master- 
pieces, but the orderly arrangement of thought 
in words. Through no foresight of our own, 
but thanks to the pressure of our immigrants 
upon us, we have ceased teaching "eloquence" 
and "rhetoric," and have taken upon ourselves 
the humbler task of helping the thinking mind 
to find words and a form of expression as quickly, 
as easily, above all as simply, as possible. The 
old teacher of rhetoric aspired to make Burkes, 
Popes, or De Quinceys. We are content if 
our students become the masters rather than 
the servants of their prose.. 

The party of the left presents a more frontal 
attack upon the teaching of the writing of Eng- 
lish. Show the undergraduate how to think, they 
say; fill his mind with knowledge, and his pen will 
find the way. Ah, but there is the fallacy ! Why 
not help him to find the way — as in Latin, or 
surveying, or English literature. The way in 
composition can be taught, as in these other 
subjects. Writing, like skating, or sailing a 
ship, has its especial methods, its especial 
technique, even as it has its especial medium, 

199 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

words, and the larger unities of expression. 
The laws that govern it are simple. They 
are always in intimate connection with the 
thought behind, and worthless without it, but 
they can be taught. Ask any effective teacher 
of composition to show you what he has done 
time and again for the Freshmen whose sprawl- 
ing thought he has helped to form into coherent 
and unified expression. And do not be de- 
ceived by analogies drawn from our colleges of 
the mid-nineteenth century, where composi- 
tion was not taught, and men wrote well; or 
from the English universities, where the same 
conditions are said (with dissenting voices) to 
exist. In the first place, they had no immi- 
grant problem in the mid-century, nor have 
in Oxford and Cambridge. In the second, the 
rigorous translation back and forward between 
the classics and the mother-tongue, now obsolete 
in America, but still a requisite for an English 
university training, provides a drill in accuracy of 
language whose efficiency is not to be despised. 
The student must express his intellectual 
gains even as he absorbs them, or the crystal- 
lization of knowledge into personal thought 
will be checked at the beginning. The boy 

200 



WRITING ENGLISH 



must be able to say what he knows, or write 
what he knows, or he does not know it. And 
it is as important to help him express as to 
help him absorb. The teachers in other de- 
partments must aid in this task or we fail; 
but where the whole duty of making expression 
keep pace with thought and with life is given 
to them, they will be forced either to overload 
or to neglect all but the little arcs that bound 
their subjects. And since they are specialists 
in other fields, and so neglect that technique 
of writing which in itself is a special stud}^ 
their task, when they accept it, is hard, and 
their labor, when it is forced upon them, too 
often ineffective. Composition must be taught 
where college education proceeds — that is the 
truth of the matter; and if not taught directly, 
then indirectly, with pain and with waste. 

The school of the Optimists approaches 
this question of writing English with self- 
criticism and with a full realization of the 
difficulties, and of the tentative nature of the 
methods now in use, but with confidence as 
to the possibility of ultimate success. In 
order to be an Optimist in composition you 
must have some stirrings of democracy in 

201 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

your veins. You must be interested in the 
need of the average man to shape his writ- 
ing into a useful tool that will serve his 
purposes, whether in the ministry or the 
soap business. This is the utilitarian end 
of writing English. And you must be inter- 
ested in developing his powers of self-expres- 
sion, even when convinced that no great 
soul is longing for utterance, but only a 
commonplace human mind — like your own^ — 
that will be eased by powers of writing and 
of speech. It is here that composition is of 
service to the imagination, and incidentally to 
culture; and I should speak more largely of 
this latter service if there were space in this 
essay to bring forward all the aspects of college 
composition. It is the personal end of writing 
English. If the average man turns out to be a 
superman with mighty purposes ahead, or if he 
has 2l great soul seeking utterance, he will have 
far less need of your assistance; but you can 
aid him, nevertheless, and your aid will count 
as never before, and will be your greatest per- 
sonal reward, though no greater service to the 
community, perhaps, than the countless hours 
spent upon the minds of the multitude. 

202 



WRITING ENGLISH 



In order to be an Optimist it is still more 
important for you to understand that writ- 
ing English well depends first upon intellectual 
grasp, and second upon technical skill, and 
always upon both. As for the first, your boy, 
if you are the parent of an undergraduate, is 
undergoing a curious experience in college. 
Against his head a dozen teachers are discharg- 
ing round after round of information. Some- 
times they mis»; sometimes the shots glance off; 
sometimes the charge sinks in. And his brain 
is undergoing less obvious assaults. He is 
like the core of soft iron in an electro-magnet 
upon which invisible influences are constantly 
beating. His teachers are harassing his mind 
not only' with facts, but also with methods of 
thinking: the historical method; the experi- 
mental method of science; the interpretative 
method of literature. Unfortunately, the 
charges of information too often lodge higgledy- 
piggledy, like bird-shot in a sign-board; and 
the waves of influence make an impression 
which is too often incoherent and confused. 
If the historians really taught the youth to 
think historically from the beginning and the 
scientists really taught him to think scientifically 

203 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

from the beginning, and he could apply his new 
methods of thought to the expression of his own 
emotions, experiences, life, then the teacher 
of composition might confine himself to the sec- 
ond of his duties, and teach only that technique 
which makes writing to uncoil itself as easily 
and as vividly as a necklace of matched and har- 
monious stones. In the University of Utopia 
we shall leave the organization of thought to 
the other departments, and have plenty left to 
do; but we are not yet in Utopia. 

At present, the teacher of composition stands 
like a sentry at the gates of knowledge, chal- 
lenging all who come out speaking random 
words and thoughts, asking: "Have you 
thought it out.^" "Have you thought it out 
clearly .f^" "Can you put your conclusions into 
adequate words .f^" And if the answers are 
unsatisfactory, he must proceed to teach that 
orderly, logical development of thought from 
cause to effect which underlies all provinces of 
knowledge, and reaches well into the unmapped 
territories of the imagination. But even in 
Utopia composition must remain the testing- 
ground of education, though we shall hope for 
more satisfactory answers to our challenges. 

204 



WRITING ENGLISH 



And even in Utopia, where the undergraduate 
will perfect his thinking while acquiring his 
facts, it will be the duty of the teacher of writ- 
ing to help him to apply his intellectual powers 
to his experiences, his emotions, his imagination 
— in short, to self-expression. And there will 
still remain the technique of writing. 

Theoretically, when the undergraduate has 
assembled his thoughts he is ready and com- 
petent to write them, but practically he is 
neither entirely ready nor usually entirely com- 
petent. It is one thing to assemble an auto- 
mobile; it is another thing to run it. The 
technique of writing is not nearly so interesting 
as the subject and the thought in writing; 
just as the method of riding a horse is not 
nearly so interesting as the ride itself. And 
yet when you consider it as a means to an end, 
as a subtle, elastic, and infinitely useful craft, 
the method of writing is not uninteresting even 
to those who have to learn and not to teach it. 
The technique of composition has to do with 
words. We are most of us inapt with words; 
even when ideas begin to come plentifully they 
too often remain vague, shapeless, ineffective 
for want of words to name them. And words 

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COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

can be taught; not merely the words them- 
selves, but their power, their suggestiveness, 
their Tightness or wrongness for the meanings 
sought. The technique of writing has to do 
with sentences. Good thinking makes good 
sentences, but the sentence must be flexible if 
it is to ease the thought. We can learn its 
elasticity, we can practise the flow of clauses, 
until the wooden declaration that leaves half 
unexpressed gives place to a fluent and ac- 
curate transcript of the mind, form fitting sub- 
stance as the vase the water within it. This 
technique has to do with paragraphs. The 
critic knows how few even among our profes- 
sional writers master their paragraphs. It is 
not a dead, fixed form that is to be sought. It 
is rather a flexible development, which grows 
beneath the reader's eye until the thought is 
opened with vigor and with truth. It is inter- 
esting to search in the paragraph of an in- 
effective editorial or article or theme for the 
sentence that embodies the thought; to find 
it dropped like a turkey's egg where the first 
opportunity offers, or hidden by the rank 
growth of comment and reflection about it. 
Such research is illuminating for those who do 

206 



WRITING ENGLISH 



not believe in the teaching of composition; 
— if it begins at home, so much the better. 
And, finally, the technique of writing has to do 
with the whole, whether sonnet or business 
letter or report to a board of directors. How to 
lead one thought into another; how to exclude 
the irrelevant; how to weigh upon that which 
is important; how to hold together the whole 
structure so that the subject, all the subject, 
and nothing but the subject, shall be laid before 
the reader: this requires good thinking, but 
good thinking without technical skill is like a 
strong arm in tennis without facility in the 
strokes. 

The program I have outlined is simpler in 
theory than in practice. In practice, it is 
easier to discover the disorder than the thought 
that it confuses; in practice, technical skill 
must be forced upon undergraduates unaccus- 
tomed to thoroughness, in a country that in no 
department of life, except perhaps business, 
has hitherto been compelled to value technique. 
Even the optimist grows pessimistic sometimes 
in teaching composition. 

And yet in the teaching of composition the re- 
sults are perhaps more evident than elsewhere in 

14 207 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

the whole range of college work. It is wonder- 
ful to see what can be accomplished by an en- 
thusiast in the sport of transmuting brain into 
words. When the teacher seeks for his material 
in the active interests of the student — whether 
athletics or engineering or literature or catching 
trout, — when he stimulates the finer interests, 
drawing off, as it were, the cream into words, 
the results are convincing. Writing is one of 
the most fascinating, most engaging of pursuits 
for the man with a craving to grasp the reality 
about him and name it in words. And even 
for the undergraduate, whose imagination is 
just developing, and whose brain protests 
against logical thought, it can be made as 
interesting as it is useful. 

Although the teaching of English composi- 
tion in this country is a vast industry in which 
thousands of workmen are employed, and in 
which a million or so young minds are invested, 
I do not wish to take it too seriously. There 
are many accomplishments more important 
for the welfare of the race. And yet, if it be 
true that maturity of intellect is never attained 
without that clearness and accuracy of think- 
ing which can be made to show itself in good 

208 



WRITING ENGLISH 



writing, then the failure of the undergraduate 
to write well is serious, and the struggle to make 
him write better, worthy of the attention of 
those who have children to be educated. I 
do not think that success in this struggle will 
come through the policy of laissez-faire. All 
undergraduates profit by organized help in 
their writing; many require it. I do not think 
that success will come by a pedantical insistence 
upon correctness in form without regard to the 
sense. Squeezing unwilling words from in- 
different minds may be discipline; it certainly 
is not teaching. I think that success will 
come only to the teacher who is a middleman 
between thought and expression, valuing both. 
When we succeed in making the bulk of our 
undergraduates really think; when we can 
inspire them with a modicum of that passion 
for truth in words which is the moving force 
of the good writer; when the schools help us 
and the outside world demands and supports 
efficiency in diction — then we shall carry 
through the program of the Optimists. 



TEACHING ENGLISH 

THE so-called new professions have been 
given abundant space of late in the Sun- 
day newspaper; but among them I do not find 
numbered the teaching of English. Neverthe- 
less, with such exceptions as advertising, social 
service, and efficiency-engineering, it is one of 
the newest as well as one of the largest. I 
do not mean the teaching of English writing. 
Directly or indirectly that has been taught 
since the heavenly grace instructed Caedmon 
in his stable. I mean English literature, which 
has been made a subject of formal instruction 
in our schools and colleges only since the latter 
half of the nineteenth century. Yet already 
the colleges complain that the popularity of 
this comparatively recent addition to the 
curriculum is so great that harder, colder, 
more disciplinary subjects are pushed to the 
wall (and this in practical America!); and in 
the schools only the so-called vocational courses 

210 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



are as much talked about and argued over by 
the educational powers. An army of men 
and women are teaching or trying to teach us 
English — which includes American — literature. 
The results of this new profession — as even 
those who earn their bread thereby are will- 
ing to confess — are sometimes humorous. The 
comicality of scholarship — as when the sweaty 
hack-work of some hanger-on of the great 
Elizabethans is subjected to elaborate study 
and published in two volumes — belongs rather 
to the satire of research than to teaching. But 
there are many ludicrous sequels to the com- 
pulsory study of literature. Poor Hawthorne, 
shyest and rarest of spirit among our men of 
letters, becomes a text-book for the million. 
Dick Steele, who dashed off his cheerful trifles 
between sprees, is raised to a dreary immortality 
of comparison with the style and humor of 
Addison; their reputations — like a new torture 
in the Inferno — seesawing with the changing 
opinions of critics who edit "The Spectator" 
for the schools. And Shakespeare, who shares 
the weaknesses of all mortal workmen, is made 
a literary god (since this new profession must 
have its divinity), before whom all tastes bow 

211 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

down. Then in our classes we proceed to 
paraphrase, to annotate, to question and cross- 
question the books these great men have left 
behind them, until their tortured spirits must 
envy the current unpopularity of Latin and 
Greek. As one of my undergraduates wrote 
at the end of an examination : 

Shakespeare, this prosy paper makes me blush; 
Your finest fancies we have turned to — mush! 

Nevertheless, it is the dilettante, the con- 
noisseur, and the esthete who sneer at the re- 
sults of teaching English. The practical man 
will not usually be scornful, even when he is 
unsympathetic; and the wise many, who know 
that power over good books is better than a 
legacy, are too thankful for benefits received 
to judge a profession by its failures. In truth, 
the finer minds, the richer lives that must be 
made possible if our democracy is not to be- 
come a welter of vulgar commercialism, are 
best composted by literature. And therefore 
the teacher of English, provided he can really 
teach, has a just claim upon the attention of 
every American parent. But what is teaching 
literature.^ 

212 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



There is a function borrowed from Germany 
for our graduate schools, in which a group of 
professors have at their mercy for an hour of 
oral examination a much-to-be-pitied candidate 
for the degree of doctor of philosophy. They 
may ask him any question in their field that 
appears on previous reflection to be sufficiently 
difficult; and as the more one knows the more 
difficulty a given subject presents, and they 
are specialists, the ordeal is infernal. If I 
were brought before a like tribunal, composed 
of parents of our undergraduates, and asked to 
justify this new profession, I should probably 
begin by asserting that the purpose of teaching 
English is to give light for the mind and solace 
for the heart. 

The function of the teacher of English as a 
shedder of light is perhaps more familiar to 
himself than to the world; but it assuredly exists 
and has even been forced upon him. The 
teacher of pure science utterly repudiates the 
notion that he is to shed light upon the meaning 
of life. His business is to teach the observed 
processes of Nature, and he is too busy exploding 
old theories of how she works, and creating new 
ones, to concern himself with the spiritual wel- 

213 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

fare of this generation. Perhaps it is just as 
well. As for the philosophers, in spite of the 
efforts of William James they have not yet 
consented to elucidate their subject for the 
benefit of the democracy; — with this result, 
that the average undergraduate learns the 
little philosophy that is taught him, in his class 
in English literature. Indeed, as if by a con- 
spiracy in a practical world anxious to save 
time for the study of facts, not only the at- 
tributes of culture, but even ethics, morality, 
and the implications of science are left to the 
English department. 

The burden is heavy. The temptation to 
throw it off, or to make use of the opportunity 
for a course in things-in-general and an easy 
reputation, is great. And yet all the world 
of thought does form a part of a course in 
English, for all that has matured in human 
experience finds its way into literature. And 
since good books are the emanations of radiant 
minds, the teacher of English must in the 
long run teach light. 

But even if literature did not mean light for 

the mind, it would still be worth while to try 

to teach it, if only to prepare that solace for 

214 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



the weary soul in reading which the most active 
must some day crave. The undergraduate 
puts on a solemn face when told that he may 
need the stimulus of books as an incentive to 
life, or the relaxation of books as a relief from 
it; but he remains inwardly unimpressed. And 
yet one does not have to be a philosopher to 
know that in this age of hurry and strain and 
sudden depressions the power to fall back on 
other minds and other times is above price. 
Therefore we teach literature in the hope that to 
the poets and the essayists, the playwrights 
and the novelists, men may be helped to bring 
slack or weary minds for cure. 

All essays upon literature discourse upon the 
light and sweetness that flow from it. But 
this is not an essay upon literature; and that is 
why I have dismissed these hoped-for results 
so summarily, although profoundly believ- 
ing that they are the ultimate purpose — in- 
deed, the raison d'etre — of teaching English. 
My business is rather with the immediate 
aim of these English courses to which we are 
sending our sons and daughters by the tens of 
thousands. I wish to discuss frankly, not so 
much the why, as the how, of teaching English. 

215 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

Fine words cannot accomplish it. When I 
first began to teach I met my Freshman classes 
with rich and glowing words — which I have 
repeated with more sobriety in the preceding 
paragraphs. Literature, I said, is the criti- 
cism of life; it is the spur of the noble mind 
and the comfort of the depressed. My ardent 
descriptions fell flat. They were too true; the 
Freshmen had heard them before. Now I begin 
bluntly with the assertion that the average 
young American does not know how to read; 
and proceed to prove it. To read out the 
meaning of a book; to interpret literature as 
it in turn interprets life — whatever may be our 
ultimate purpose, that I take to be the most 
immediate aim of teaching English. 

I do not intend to slight the knowledge to be 
gained. Facts are well worth picking up on 
the way, but unless they are used they remain 
just facts — and usually forgotten ones. Where 
are your college note-books, crammed with 
the facts of English lectures .^^ How much 
does the graduate remember of dates of editions, 
of "tendencies," and "sources"? What can 
he say (as the examination paper has it) of 
Vaughan, of Cynewulf, of the Gothic novel, 

2ia 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



and of pantisocracy? Something, somewhere, I 
hope, for if the onward sweep of English lit- 
erature is not familiar to him, if the great 
writers have no local habitation and a name, 
and Milton must be read in terms of twentieth- 
century England, and Poe as if he wrote for 
a Sunday newspaper syndicate, his English 
courses were dismally unsuccessful. And yet 
to have heard of Beowulf and Tess of the 
D'Urbervilles and Fair Rosamond is not to 
know English literature. 

The undergraduate (and his parent) must 
be able to read literature in order to know 
it, and to read he must have the power of 
interpretation. It is easy to read the story 
in the Sunday supplement, where thoughts of 
one syllable are clothed in obvious symbols 
supposed to represent life. It is harder to 
read contemporary writing that contains real 
thought and real observation, for the mind 
and the imagination have to be stretched a 
little to take in the text. It is still more dif- 
ficult to enjoy with due comprehension the 
vast treasure of our inherited literature, which 
must always outweigh in value our current 
gains. There the boy you send us to teach 

217 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

will be perplexed by the peculiarities of lan- 
guage, set astray by his lack of background, 
and confused by the operations of a time-spirit 
radically different from his own. A few trivial- 
ities of diction or reference may hide from 
him the life that some great genius has kept 
burning in the printed page. And even if the 
unfamiliar and the unexplained do not dis- 
courage him, even if he reads Shakespeare 
or Milton or Gray with his ardor unchilled, 
nevertheless, if he does not interpret, he gets 
but half. Here is the chief need for teaching 
English. 

Hotspur, for example, in the first part of 
Shakespeare's "Henry IV.," bursts into en- 
thusiastic speech: 

By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap, 

To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon, 

Or dive into the bottom of the deep. 

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, 

And pluck up drowned honor by the locks. 

Can the Freshman read it.^^ Not unless he 
knows what "honor" meant for Hotspur and 
for Shakespeare. Not unless he comprehends 
the ardent exuberance of the Renaissance that 
inspires the extravagance of the verse. 

218 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



Or Milton's famous portrait of Satan: 

Darkened so, yet shone 
Above them all the Archangel : but his face 
Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care 
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows 
Of dauntless courage and considerate pride. 
Waiting revenge. 

Do you see him? Not unless, like Milton, you 
remember Jove and his lightnings, not unless 
the austere imagery of the Old Testament is 
present in your imagination; not unless "con- 
siderate" means more to you than an accent 
in the verse. In truth, the undergraduate 
cannot read Stevenson's "Markheim," Tenny- 
son's "Lotos-Eaters," Kipling's "Recessional," 
or an essay by Emerson — to gather scattered 
instances — without background, without an 
interpretative insight, and without an exact 
understanding of the thought behind the words. 
Without them he must be content, at best, 
with a fifty-per-cent. efficiency of comprehen- 
sion. And fifty per cent, is below the margin 
of enjoyment and below the point where real 
profit begins. 

But even fifty per cent, is a higher figure than 
some undergraduates attain at the beginning 

219 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

of their college careers. Old Justice Shallow, 
for instance, pompous, boastful, tedious — Jus- 
tice Shallow with his ridiculous attempts to 
prove himself as wicked as Falstaff, and his 
empty sententiousness, is certainly as well 
defined a comic character as Shakespeare 
presents, and yet it is astonishing how much 
of him is missed by the reader who cannot yet 
interpret. 

"Justice Shallow," writes a Freshman, "seems 
to be a jolly old man who loves company and 
who would do anything to please his guests." 
"Justice Shallow," says another, "was an 
easy-going man; that is, he did not allow things 
to worry him. At times he was very mean." 
"Justice Shallow," a third proposes, "is kind- 
hearted. . . . He means well, but things do 
not come out as he had planned them." 

Shallow jolly! Shallow kind-hearted! Per- 
haps occasionally, — ^for the benefit of gentle- 
men from the court. But to describe him thus 
is as if one should define an elephant as an 
animal with four legs and a fondness for hay. 
They missed the flavor of Shallow, these boys, 
not because it was elusive, but because they 
had not learned to read. 

220 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



All good books, whether new or old, present 
such difficulties of interpretation — difficulties 
often small in themselves but great when they 
prevent that instant flush of appreciation 
which literature demands. And therefore, if 
one cannot read lightly, easily, intelligently — 
why, the storehouse is locked; the golden 
books may be purchased and perused, but 
they will be little better than so much paper 
and print. Two-thirds of an English course 
must be learning to search out the meaning of 
the written word; must be just learning how 
to read. 

This is the English teacher's program. Does 
he carry it out.^^ In truth, it is depressing to 
sit in a recitation - room, estimating, while 
some one recites and your voice is resting, 
the volume and the flow of the streams of 
literary instruction washing over the under- 
graduates; and then to see them bob up to 
the surface at the end of the hour, seemingly as 
impervious as when their heads went under. 
We teachers of English propose, as I have 
said above, to ennoble the mind by showing 
it how to feed upon the thoughts of the great, 
to save the state by sweetness and light; while 

221 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

our students sell their Miltons and Tennysons 
to the second-hand bookstore, and buy the 
machine-made, please -the -million magazines! 
The pessimist will assert that there is a screw 
out somewhere in our intellectual platform. 

Not out, but loose. My picture of the under- 
graduate, like Hamlet's picture of Claudius, is a 
likeness, but not a faithful portrait. The col- 
lege English course certainly carries with it 
no guarantee of solid literary taste, no cer- 
tainty that the average bachelor of arts will 
take a stand against the current cheapening 
of literature. He may have a row of leather- 
bound pocket Shakespeares in the living-room 
bookcase, but that is sometimes the only out- 
ward evidence of his baptism into the kingdom 
of English books. Further than that you can- 
not be sure of what teaching English has done 
for him. But neither can you be certain that 
this is all it has done for him. The evidence 
of his parents is not always to be trusted, for 
the undergraduate feels that grown-up America 
does not approve of bookishness, and so, if he 
has any literary culture, keeps it to himself. 
Men of letters, editorial writers, and other 
professional critics of our intellectual accom- 

222 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



plisliments are not good judges, for they are 
inclined to apply to a recent graduate the 
standards of an elegant and allusive brand of 
culture which is certainly not American, though 
in its way admirable enough. I am doubtful 
myself, but this much my experience has 
taught me, that, disappointing as the apparent 
results of teaching English may be, the actual 
results are far more considerable than pessimists 
suppose — as great, perhaps, as we can expect. 

The mind of the undergraduate is like a slab 
of coarse-grained wood upon which the cabinet- 
maker lavishes his stain. Its empty pores 
soak in the polishing mixture, no matter how 
richly it may be applied, and in many in- 
stances we fail to get the expected gloss. Much 
English teaching, in fact, is (to change the 
figure) subterranean in its effects. You may 
remember no Tennyson, and yet have gained 
a sensitiveness to moral beauty and an ear for 
the glory of words. Your Shakespeare may 
have gathered dust for a decade, and yet still 
be quickening your sympathy with human 
nature. That glow in the presence of a soar- 
ing pine or towering mountain; that warmth 
of the imagination as some modern struggle 
15 223 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

recalls an ancient protagonist; the feeling that 
life is always interesting somehow, somewhere — 
how much of this is due to Wordsworth, Shelley, 
Stevenson, Browning, or Keats, dim in the 
memory, perhaps, but potent in the sub- 
consciousness, no one can ever determine. 
The psychologist will answer, much. The 
layman must consider the spring, the recuper- 
ative power, the quantity and quality of 
happiness among the well-read in comparison 
with the unread, for his reply. The results 
of my own observation enable me to view even 
the debris of lectures and study in a "flunker's" 
examination paper with dejection, to be sure, 
but not with despair. The undergraduate, 
I admit sorrowfully, is usually superficial in 
his reading, and sometimes merely barbarous 
in the use he makes of it; but there is more 
gained from his training in literature than 
meets the sight. 

Thus the effects of English teaching are 
sometimes hidden. But English teachers are 
so common nowadays that of them every one 
may form his own opinion. And, indeed, the 
rain of criticism falls upon just and unjust alike. 

The undergraduate, if he takes the trouble 

224 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



to classify his teachers of English otherwise 
than as "hard" or "easy," would probably 
divide the species into two types: the highly 
polished variety with somewhat erratic clothes 
and an artistic temperament, and the cold 
scholar who moves in a world of sources, edi- 
tions, and dates. I would be content with 
this classification, superficial as it is, were it 
not that the parent of the undergraduate, who 
is footing the bills, has made no classification 
at all, and deserves, if he wants it, a more 
accurate description of the profession he is 
patronizing. English teachers, I may say to 
him, are of at least four different kinds. For 
convenience I shall name them the gossips, 
the inspirationists, the scientists, and the 
middle-of-the-road men whose ambition it is 
to teach neither anecdote, nor things in general, 
nor mere facts, but literature. 

The literary gossip is the most engaging, and 
not the least useful of them all. As the horse's 
hoofs beat "proputty, proputty, proputty" 
for Tennyson's greedy farmer, so "personality" 
rings for ever in his brain, and constantly 
mingles in his speech. "The man behind the 
book," is his worthy motto; and his lectures 

225 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

are stuffed with biographical anecdote until 
the good stories spill over. No humorous 
weakness of the Olympians is left without its 
zest, and the student learns more of Carlyle's 
indigestion, Coleridge's absent-mindedness, or 
the deformity of Pope, than of their immortal 
works. 

The literary gossip is an artist. He can raise 
dead authors to life, and give students of little 
imagination an interest in the books of the past 
which they never would have gained from mere 
printed texts. But he has the faults of the 
artistic temperament. He will sacrifice every- 
thing in order to impress his hearers. Hence 
he is never dull; and when he combines his skill 
in anecdote with real literary criticism, he 
becomes a teacher of such power that college 
presidents compete for his services. But when 
his talents do not rise above the ordinary, his 
courses are better designated vaudeville than 
the teaching of English. As the old song has 
it, when he is good he is very, very good, for 
he plows up the unresponsive mind so that 
appreciation may grow there. But when he 
is bad, he is horrid. 

The inspirationists held the whole field of 

226 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



English teaching until the scientists attacked 
them in the rear, found their ammunition- 
wagons lacking in facts, and put them upon 
their defense. The inspirationist was — no is, 
for he has been sobered but not routed by the 
onslaughts of German methodologies — a fighter 
in the cause of "uplift" in America. In 1814 
he would have been a minister of the gospel 
or an apostle of political freedom. In 1914 
he uses Shakespeare, Milton, the novelists, 
the essayists, indifferently to preach ideas — 
moral, political, esthetic, philosophical, scientific 
— to his undergraduates. At the club table 
after hours he orates at imaginary Freshmen. 
"Make 'em think!" he shouts. "Make 'em 
feel ! Give them ideas — and their literary train- 
ing will take care of itself!" And the course he 
offers is like those famous medieval ones, where 
the whole duty of man, here and hereafter, 
was to be obtained from a single professor. 
Indeed, since the field of teaching began to be 
recruited from predestined pastors who found 
the pulpit too narrow for their activities, it is 
simply astonishing how much ethics, spiritu- 
ality, and inspiration generally has been freed 
in the class-room. Ask the undergraduates. 

227 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

I mean no flippancy. I thoroughly believe 
that it is far more important to teach literature 
than the facts about literature. And all these 
things are among the ingredients of literature. 
I am merely pointing out the extremes of extra- 
literary endeavor into which the remoteness 
of the philosophers, the slackening of religious 
training in the home, and the absence of esthetic 
influences in American life have driven some 
among us. A friend of mine begins his course 
in Carlyle with a lecture on the unreality of 
matter. Browning with a discussion of the 
immortality of the soul, and Ruskin with an 
exhibition of pictures. He is responding to 
the needs of the age. Like most of the in- 
spirationists, he does not fail to teach some- 
thing; like many of them, he has little time 
left for literature. 

The day does not differ from the night more 
sharply than the scientist in teaching English 
does from the inspirationist. The literary scien- 
tist sprang into being when the scientific activ- 
ity of the nineteenth century reached esthet- 
ics and began to lay bare our inaccuracies and 
our ignorance. Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, De- 
foe — we knew all too little about their lives, 

228 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



and of what we knew a disgraceful part was 
wrong. Our knowledge of the writers of the 
Anglo-Saxon period, and of the thirteenth 
and fifteenth centuries, of the minor Eliza- 
bethan dramatists and the lyricists of the 
seventeenth century, consisted chiefly of ill- 
assorted facts or unproved generalizations. 
Gur catalogue of errors was a long one. The 
response to this crying need for scholarship, 
for science, was slow — but when it came, it 
came with a rush. Nowadays, the great 
majority of university teachers of English are 
specialists in some form of literary research. 

As far as the teacher is concerned, the result 
has doubtless been good. There have been 
broader backgrounds, more accuracy in state- 
ment, less "bluffing" — in a word, more thor- 
oughness; and the out-and-out scientists have 
set a pace in this respect that other teachers 
of English have had to follow. But, curiously 
enough, while the teacher of English, and espe- 
cially the professed scientist, has become more 
thorough, the students are said to be less so. 
How to account for so distressing a phenomenon ! 

The truth seems to be that science in English 

literature has become so minute in its investiga- 
^29 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

tion of details, so scrupulous in the accuracy 
of even the most trivial statement, that the 
teacher who specializes in this direction despairs 
of dragging his classes after him. Scholar- 
ship for this scientist has become esoteric. 
Neither the big world outside nor his little 
world of the class-room can comprehend his 
passion for date and source and text; and, 
like the Mormon who keeps his wives at home, 
he has come to practise his faith without im- 
posing it upon others. The situation is not 
entirely unfortunate. Until scientific scholar- 
ship has ended its mad scurryings for the un- 
considered trifles still left uninvestigated, and 
begun upon the broader problems of criticism 
and of teaching that will remain when all the 
dates are gathered and all the sources hunted 
home, it is questionable whether it has any- 
thing but facts to contribute to the elementary 
teaching of English. 

At present the scientist's best position is 
in the upper branches of a college education. 
There he is doing good work — except when an 
emotional, sensitive Junior or Senior, eager 
to be thrilled by literature, and to understand 

it, is provided with nothing but "scientific" 

«30 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



courses. For studying about literature — and 
this is the scientist's program — can in no pos- 
sible sense be regarded as a satisfactory alter- 
native to studying the thing itself, no matter 
how great may be its auxiliary value. And 
many a recent graduate of many a college 
who reads these lines will recognize his own 
plight in that of the youth who, finding only 
gossips who amused him, inspirationists who 
sermoned him,* and scientists who reduced 
glowing poetry to a skeleton of fact, decided 
that, in spite of the catalogue, literature itself 
was not taught in his university. 

What is teaching literature.^ But I have 
already answered that question according to 
my own beliefs, in the earlier part of this essay. 
It must be — at least for the undergraduate — 
instruction in the interpretation of literature; 
it must be teaching how to read. For if the 
boy is once taught how to turn the key, only 
such forces of heredity and environment as 
no teaching will utterly overcome can prevent 
him from entering the door. It is this that 
all wise teachers of English realize; it is this 
that the middle-of-the-road men try to put 

in practice. I give them this title because 

231 



COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS 

they do keep to the middle of the literary 
road — because they understand that the 
teacher of English should avoid the extremes 
I have depicted in the preceding paragraphs, 
without despising them. He should master 
his facts as the scientist does, because it is too 
late in the day to impose unverified facts or 
shaky generalizations even upon hearers as 
uncritical as the usual run of undergraduates. 
He should try to inspire his classes with the 
ideas and emotions of the text, for to teach the 
form of a book and neglect its contents is as if 
your grocer should send you an empty barrel. 
He should not neglect the life and color that 
literary biography brings into his field. And 
yet the aim of the right kind of instructor is 
no one of these things. He uses them all, 
but merely as steps in the attempt to teach 
his students how to read. 

This it is to follow the golden mean and make 
it actually golden in our profession. And 
indeed, when one considers that throughout 
America there are hundreds of thousands calling 
themselves educated who cannot read Shake- 
speare or the Bible, or even a good magazine, 
with justice to the text; when one considers 

g32 



TEACHING ENGLISH 



the treasures of literature, new as well as old, 
waiting to be used for the increase of happiness, 
intelligence, and power, what else can be called' 
teaching English? 



THE END 



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